


Sand or Sea, Ice or Tree

by Aerlalaith



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Magic, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Magic, Sports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-28 16:23:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10834905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerlalaith/pseuds/Aerlalaith
Summary: It's not quite hockey and it’s not quite a game, but Jack and Bitty still love the ice. And each other. Eventually. Magical Sport AU.





	1. Chapter 1

  **Chapter 1**

  
   
"Only girls do the Dance," Bitty remembered his father saying. “If we let him train with her—people are going to talk, Suzie.”   
   
Bitty had been six, maybe seven. Still called ‘Dicky’, still too little, really, to be awake past nine. He had only been crouched in the shadow of the stairwell, because he had been on his way to pilfer one last peanut-butter cookie and a glass of milk. He remembered the lights underneath the kitchen door, the shadows stepping back and forth as his parents argued.   
   
That felt like a long time ago, back when there had even still been a chance that Bitty might follow in his father’s footsteps. That was back when there had still been that potential his father must have dreamed of, must have breathed when he first held his son in his arms.   
   
His mother's reply had been short and quiet—too quiet for him to hear. His father’s response had been loud enough though. Bitty—no, _Dicky_ —slipped back upstairs, still thirsty, wondering if this meant that they weren’t going back to the rink tomorrow.   
   
But whatever his mother had said had clearly been effective. Or at least, they hadn't made him quit. Not then. He went to the rink, and then a different one, woke up before the sun, wore shirts that glittered and held his back straight and magic in his body, music in his soul, until even that wasn’t enough anymore.   
   
Only then did he quit.  
   
   
#  
   
   
From his seat on the roof of the Haus, Bitty took a long drink from the beer in his hand, absently contemplating the label where it caught the light from the closed window at his back. It had a picture of a friendly tabby on a broomstick, _Salem’s Best Brew_ scrawled across sideways in curlicue, spindly letters. He tapped the side of the bottle, feeling the way the paper crinkled beneath his fingertips.   
   
Next to him, Shitty exhaled a cloud of opaque smoke. “Brah,” he said dreamily. He shifted and his legs splayed out. Despite the chill in the air, he was wearing only a pair of green boxers. Bitty supposed he should be grateful Shitty had even managed that. "Brah, you have, like, the softest moves.” He raised his hands wide to the sky, wiggling his fingertips. “Like, it’s one thing to be soft in practice, but _today,_ man. You slipped right around them dudes. I bet you could've gone into, like, the solo Dance shit. Goddamn."  
   
"Yeah, but," Bitty said, not even realizing as the words left his mouth, "that’s for girls."  
   
He would later blame this on the contact high, but it was only after a full thirty seconds had passed without Shitty really saying anything, that Bitty realized. He flushed.  
   
"I—I mean—"  
   
"Dude." Shitty's eyebrows were practically at his hairline. He sat up straight, turning to Bitty, who cringed. "What the fuck kind of gender bullshit, Bits? Three months in and this is what you bring to me? _Bitty_."  
   
"I, um," said Bitty. He winced. "Sorry."  
   
Shitty was on a roll now. He even put his beer down. "Who the fuck even told you that?"  
   
"Uh..."  
   
“I expect a three thousand word essay on the harmfulness of gender stereotyping in sports, Mr. Bittle, to be on my desk no later than five pm tomorrow.”  
   
“Dance Magic isn’t _technically_ a sport,” Bitty hedged. “Um.”  
   
Shitty favored him with another raised eyebrow and a haughty look. He adjusted what Bitty was mostly sure were an imaginary pair of glasses. “While I am aware that the Dance remains closer to its former roots as an energy art than our own C-Form,” he said, pausing to recollect his beer and take a drink. He wiped his mouth, while Bitty wondered if Shitty was drunk enough to completely forget about this in the morning. “Fact remains, my dude, there’s still competition. Ergo? Sport.” He crossed his arms. “There _are_ male Dancers at the Olympics.”  
   
Bitty pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Yes, I _know_ , Shitty. Lord. I misspoke, all right?”  
   
“And they are no less masculine for wearing sparkly shirts.” Shitty took one last gulp, shook out his hair, and pointed at his naked chest. “If I had to wear a shirt, may it be a sparkly one, you know, Bits?”  
   
Luckily, Bitty was rescued from having to answer by the timely arrival of their team captain. Jack, wearing a red Samwell sweater and a deep crease between his brows, poked his head out of the window leading to the roof. The rest of him followed, one leg at a time onto the ragged shingles. Bitty was sober enough to be worried that maybe the roof wouldn’t hold them all, and drunk and tired enough not to care. He took another swig of his own beer.  
   
Jack glanced around, gaze landing on them. "Shitty."  
   
Shitty saluted him. "Yo. Jack. Beloved." He nodded towards Bitty. “Bitty is going to write me an essay on gender stereotyping. It’s your job as captain to make sure he cites his sources. I want MLA.”  
   
Jack frowned. “It’s two in the morning.” He turned to eye Bitty, his face mostly blank, but somehow still managing to communicate disapproval. “Why are you out here? The party’s over.”  
   
“Jack.” Shitty clucked his tongue. “Beloved son. You are not," Shitty took another lean drag of his joint, "not my mother. You are my son. Like I said. And if I want to sit on this damn roof," Shitty indicated, hands spread, "and rejoice in our spectacular destruction of Amherst’s—frankly, _embarrassing_ —C-Form team—"  
   
"Bittle." Jack turned to him. In the dark his eyes seemed bottomless. "You should get some rest."  
   
Bitty sighed and downed the last of his beer. Typical Jack. "Yeah," he said, not looking up. "I was just going in." He got to his feet, careful on the edges where the roof sloped sharply towards the ground.  
   
Jack gave a curt nod.  
   
"Oh, fine," Shitty huffed. "Leave me here alone. Betrayal. Betrayal of the highest order!"  
   
"Jesus, Shits."  
   
"Shut up, Zimmermann, you're dead to me now."  
   
"Get off the roof, Shits."  
   
"Absolutely not, you traitor."  
   
Climbing back in through the window, Bitty allowed himself a smile.  
   
The post-match kegster that had brought him to the Haus in the first place having significantly wound down, Bitty encountered little difficulty making his way out the door. Outside, a chill breeze rustled his hair. He could hear an owl somewhere in the trees above him. Bitty wrapped his arms around himself and shivered a little. He usually didn't mind the walk back to the dorms, but he probably would have appreciated it more if it hadn't been the very dead of night.  
   
Not that he was about to give Jack the satisfaction of saying so by asking for an escort, heaven forbid, but it was true that the campus became a great deal eerier with the sunset.  
   
As he walked, he made sure to skirt around the pond, keeping a close eye on the Night Geese. Shitty said they were harmless, wouldn’t have been allowed to flock there if they meant trouble, but even after three months as a Samwell student, their red glares still made him uneasy. They didn’t have Night Geese in Georgia.  
   
Bitty rather thought that given the events of the day—and he _had_ made a decent showing for himself at the match, even Jack had been forced to admit it—by the time he'd jammed his key into the dorm entrance, conquered the stairs, and collapsed in bed still fully clothed, he should’ve been tired enough to sleep.  
   
He was wrong.   
   
Bitty grumbled something indistinctive, quiet enough to avoid waking his roommate. He turned over and punched the pillow. He tried to rest his head comfortably, rolled over again, and stared at the black ceiling. He counted his breaths, then his heartbeats. He thought about what Shitty had said.  
   
The coaches knew, of course. It had been on the tape he'd sent them. Sure, he'd switched over to C-Form in high school, after they'd moved, too far to train with Katya, but it wasn't like he hadn't done it. It wasn't like it was something he could just laugh off as something kids do and then grow out of. The training, the knowledge, that muscle memory. It was a certain tensing, a synchronization when he first stepped onto a Conduit, automatic as breathing. Even if he _was_ rusty, it wasn’t going to go away. They were bound to notice eventually. Shitty already had.  
   
But Shitty at least, didn't seem like he'd care. Or maybe he was just saying that?  
   
Or maybe the boys wouldn't mind?  
   
Well. Maybe the _boys_ wouldn’t mind, but Jack probably would make a stink about it, Bitty decided. Jack already thought he was a piss-poor excuse for a C-Former. He thought Bitty was almost _too_ soft, _too_ in tune with the Conduits. After all, the point of C-Form wasn’t to meld energies with the Conduits, it was to meld energies with your _team_ —anything else was Dance territory.   
   
Bitty hoped that Shitty didn’t think he was some terrible misogynist now. That wasn’t the impression he’d wanted to make at all. So, maybe he could just tell Shitty?   
   
His mind still churning over the possibilities, Bitty fell into an uneasy sleep.  
   
The next thing he knew, he was being brutally awoken by the heavy and grating sounds of someone’s insistent banging.  
   
"What?" said Bitty stupidly as, blond hair stuck at several incredibly unflattering angles, he popped his head up from underneath the covers to eye the door.  
   
The banging continued.  
   
Bitty cast a quick glance over at his roommate, still snoozing away, and then reluctantly pushed back the covers to stand. He hissed at the feeling of cold floor beneath his feet, and padded over to the door. He yanked it open, ready to give whoever was on the other side a firm piece of his mind, but when he caught sight of the person standing there, his jaw slackened, and his words died on his lips.  
   
"Bittle," said Jack, looking disgustingly together and awake. "We've got practice."  
   
"What," said Bitty. “No. It’s Sunday?”  
   
"Ten minutes," Jack said. "Striking workshop. See you at the rink."   
   
He gave another one of his curt little nods, lips pressed tight, before spinning around and striding off back in the direction of the stairs, leaving Bitty staring after him.  
   
"What," said Bitty, weakly, clutching the doorjamb for reassurance, "what the hell?"  
   
Down at the rink, the sun barely beginning to hint at false dawn, Jack paced back and forth near the edges of the bleachers, arms crossed.  "Look," said Jack. He ran his hand through his hair. It was already as messy as it had been post-match yesterday. "You're going to be on this team, you've got to be able to take a strike."  
   
In front of him, Bitty bit his lip and looked at his shoes.   
   
"You know where the energy is," Jack continued, forehead creasing, "you can handle it just fine. It's just this—this one simple thing."  
   
"It's not simple." Bitty was still looking at his shoes. The laces were frayed, he noticed. He should buy some new ones.   
   
"It is simple." Jack glowered. "If we practice it, you can get past it."  
   
Bitty looked up. "Why are you being so nice to me?”  
   
Jack's eyes narrowed. "Pick a Conduit, Bittle," he said.  
   
Out of spite, and because Jack was from the north, Bitty picked sand. He was rewarded with a tightening around Jack's eyes, but otherwise Jack said nothing, simply nodded and gestured him towards one of the practice pits.   
   
Bitty exhaled. He tugged off his rubber-soled sneakers—rubber was no good for a Conduit, even one as solid as sand—and padded over to the pit. The sun hadn’t had time to warm it yet, and Bitty stepped gingerly down from the platform onto the east dune. Jack leapt casually straight off the edge of the pit onto the peak of the west dune, barely twenty feet away.   
   
It was only once he was standing barefoot on the cool, shifting grains, when Jack said, “Shield up, Bittle,” and then came at him with a sizzling bolt of blue out of _freaking nowhere_ that Bitty remembered exactly what they were here to practice and why he fucking hated sand.   
   
Sand was _hard_ to move on. Hard to spin away, redirect his energy, hard to—  
   
“Wait, wait, wait!” Bitty cried. “S—stop!” His shields dropped of their own accord, the soft sunshine yellow of them fading into the ground. Bitty fell with them, gathered his knees towards his chest, expecting the sting of energy at any moment.   
   
The blow never came. Instead, Jack stepped up next to him. Did he actually look _concerned_? “I didn’t even hit you.”  
   
“That’s not the point,” Bitty said. He willed his hands still.   
   
Jack sighed. “Can you stand up?”  
   
His legs were wobbly. Bitty grabbed the edge of the pit for support. “Yeah, no,” he said, conjuring up a wane smile. “I’m good.”  
   
Jack still looked doubtful. “I’m going to come at you again,” he warned. “Block it this time.”  
   
But as soon as Bitty saw Jack raise his arm, he blurted out, “Wait!”   
   
“ _What_ , Bittle?”  
   
“Could we—could we switch to ice?”  
   
In that moment, Bitty was one hundred percent sure that if he had suggested any other Conduit, he would have gotten a “tough” and a “the Conduit doesn't matter”, but because it was _ice_. Well. Jack’s eyes gleamed.   
   
“Okay,” he said.  
   
Given the go-ahead, Bitty clambered hastily out of the sand pit. He didn’t bother to tug on his shoes, though if they were going to be spending any significant time on the ice field, he knew he was going to regret not bringing the practice cloth and metal ones.   
   
“You can go get your shoes out of the locker room if you want,” Jack said, clearly noticing Bitty’s wince as he toed the edges of the ice. Naturally, Jack wasn’t even flinching, though he was already in full contact with it, jeans rolled up and bare feet pink.   
   
Lord, but their illustrious captain would put down a metal floor and set up an ice field in his bedroom if he could, Bitty thought to himself.  He shook his head. “I’m okay. Don’t need the shoes today.”  
   
“If you’re sure.”  
   
(He wasn’t. His feet were going to _burn_ later, for sure, but like hell would he tell Jack that.)  
   
“Okay, square up again,” said Jack.  
   
Bitty squinted at him. “Wha—hey!” He blanched as another strike of blue, brighter this time, though that could have just been the refraction off the ice, blasted towards him. Out of something like instinct and something else like terror, Bitty threw up his shields and spun. The blue ricocheted away, then slingshot back towards Jack, who barely had enough time to throw up his own shield and absorb it.  
   
“Um,” said Bitty, when the glow faded and Jack dropped his shields, face like thunder. “Sorry.”  
   
“See, that’s what I’m talking about!” Jack scowled at him. “You pull stupid shit like that at a match, you’re throwing the energy back at _us_. It’s reckless! You could hurt someone, Bittle!”   
   
“I—” Bitty said. His shoulders caved inward and he tried not to flinch as Jack loomed over him. “I’m sorry, okay! I don’t mean to, it just happens!”  
   
Jack crossed his arms. “You’re plenty good at absorbing the energy when we pass it to you. It’s the same thing.”  
   
“Passing it and throwing it are totally different things!”  
   
His nostrils flaring, Jack said, “They’re not. You’re thinking of them differently, but they’re _not different_ , Bittle. Energy is energy.”  
   
God, he sounded just like _Katya_. Bitty toed at the ice. “Intent matters,” he said, not at all sulkily.   
   
“We’re doing it again.” Jack squared his stance.   
   
“What?” Bitty eyed Jack and then the window with barely concealed panic. The sun had already risen completely. He felt his stomach growl. “For how long?”  
   
Jack shrugged. “You tell me.”  
   
“But—”  
   
“And don’t ricochet it at me this time,” Jack added. He crossed his arms. “I don’t want to pay for damaging the rink.”  
  

#  
   
   
Bruised, sore, and absolutely drained, Bitty dragged himself back to the Haus several hours later. Jack had gone on ahead, still looking fresh as a daisy, while Bitty lingered in the showers, then made a stop off at his dorm, ostensibly to collect his homework. He made good headway on his reading for about fifteen minutes, then decided that he was too tired to focus. Only one thing left to do, really.   
   
“Hey, Itty Bitty,” Holster said, looming behind him to sniff at the air. “Bro, you are like, the energizer bunny of baking, you know? Do you ever _stop_?”  
   
“Ha, ha.” Bitty pointed a spoon at him. “You make fun of me, you get no cupcakes, mister.”  
   
“Oh, damn,” Ransom whistled, popping up next to Holster. “Cupcakes?”  
   
“I’m all in,” Shitty yawned, padding into the kitchen after them. He stuck his head into the refrigerator and pulled out a beer.   
   
“Not with the cupcakes,” Bitty said sadly, catching sight of him. “Shitty.”  
   
“Sorry, Bits.” Shitty winked. “Hair of the dog and shit.”  
   
“Don’t tell me you’re actually hungover, man.” Holster reached out as if to prod at the freshly emerged cupcakes, but pulled his hand back at the last moment when Bitty shot him another glare.  
   
Shitty shrugged. “Happens to the best of us. Plus the geese making a racket.”  
   
“Fucking geese,” Ransom commented, mouth half-full of the previous batch of cupcakes he’d discovered sitting innocuously on the other side of the kitchen counter.  “C’mere, Holtzy.”  
   
“Fuck,” Holster said. He reached for one. “Bitty, bro, you should totes frost these though. I mean, they’re awesome, but I’m just saying.”  
   
“Oh, for real.” Ransom’s eyes widened.   
   
“Well I was _gonna_ ,” Bitty sighed, but he didn’t sound angry, more resigned. “Don’t eat all of ‘em, y’all. I don’t want to waste this good frosting.”  
   
“For sure, dude,” Holster said. He gave an enthusiastic thumbs up. “Rans and I’ve got that thing with the volleyball team anyway. Got to beat it.”  
   
Shitty peered at them curiously over the rim of his beer bottle. “What thing?”  
   
“Just, like,” said Holster. “A thing.”  
   
“It’s brunch.”  
   
“Rans,” Holster complained.   
   
“He has a date.”  
   
“Oh. Well then. I salute you, sirs.” Shitty nodded regally at both of them, then laid his head down on the table, cradled between his elbows, and groaned. “Hair of the dog is not helpful.”  
   
“Here you go.” Bitty set a glass of water down on the table, waving off Ransom and Holster as they left the room. Shitty mumbled his thanks. He lifted his head enough to sip delicately at the water, and then dropped it back down again.   
   
“Hey, Shitty?” Bitty ventured, after a few more minutes of quiet. He began to frost the first batch of cooled cupcakes.  
   
“Hmm?”  
   
“I uh, about yesterday. Um.”  
   
“Yesterday?”  
   
“Last night?”  
   
Shitty raised his head again, giving Bitty an inscrutable look. “Bits, I realize I was incredibly sloshed last night, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember if I had been less than a gentleman to you.”  
   
“What? _No_.” Bitty’s cheeks burned. He turned back around resolutely towards the cupcakes. “That’s not what I meant!”  
   
“Oh, okay.” Shitty scratched at his belly. “What did you mean?”  
   
Bitty let out a breath. He took a moment to think, gaze settling on the yellowing curtains hanging over the window by the sink, cataloguing the reds and browns of the maple leaves outside fallen on the grass. “I just. Um.” He shrugged. “I said some stuff and I just, I guess it’s important you know…”   
   
“Bitty.” Shitty’s face was completely serious now. “Whatever it is, man. I’m not going to judge you for it.”  
   
Bitty’s shoulders slumped. “You can’t tell Jack,” he said. “But I, um. I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to make fun or anything about Dancers last night, or stereotype, or anything. I um. I actually used to, um. Used to be one and I. Well. I got a lot of, uh, it wasn’t very impressive thing for a—a boy to do, down in Georgia. Specially seeing as how my daddy was the football coach and would’ve preferred I stay out of m—magic sports entirely, you know, it’s kind of—not too popular down there, lot of prejudice so—”  
   
“Bitty, Bitty, _breath_ , man.” Shitty was somehow standing right in front of him, hands on his shoulders.   
   
“Sorry.”  
   
Shttiy squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t be sorry, my dude. But just to make sure I got this all right, you’re telling me you used to do actual, legit, Conduit-level Dance-Magic?”  
   
“Um.” Bitty peeked at him from underneath his eyelashes, trying to gauge Shitty’s reaction. He let out a shaky breath. “I uh, yeah?”  
   
“Whoa, dude.” And Shitty didn’t look angry, Bitty realized, or his usual chill. He looked— _elated_? Bitty blinked. “That is wicked awesome, dude!”  
   
“Oh, I,” Bitty said, dazedly. The taut feeling in his chest was slowly draining away. “You, uh. You really think so?”  
   
“Hell yeah!” Shitty slapped a companionable hand between Bitty’s shoulder blades. “Brah, that shit takes so much skill. No wonder you’re so smooth out there.” He whistled. “Damn.”  
   
Bitty blinked, a smile making his way towards his face. “I kind of miss it sometimes,” he admitted. “Not that I don’t like C-Form, I mean, it’s great to play with y’all on a team and everything, just. Sometimes I miss it being just me and the Conduit, you know?”  
   
“I mean, I don’t, but I can imagine.” Shitty sat back down again, reaching for the glass of water that Bitty had given him. “Must’ve been a rush.”  
   
“It was.” Bitty exhaled.   
   
“Why’d you quit?”  
   
Bitty lifted one shoulder. He picked up the knife to start frosting again. “We moved to a new town,” he said. “Kind of far from my coach. And, uh, like I said.” He set the first cupcake on the tray and reached for another one. “Not too popular down south.”  
   
Shitty grimaced. “Devil worship?”  
   
Bitty couldn’t help himself. He snorted. “Lord no,” he said. “Shitty, come on. We’re not that all backwards. I’ve read Harry Potter.” He placed the knife on the counter and turned on the faucet. “Magic’s just thought more of a, uh, feminine pursuit is all, I guess.” He looked around, face wry. “Kitchen witchery, you know? Dance.”  
   
“Rude.”  
   
“It is what it is.”  
   
“But what about C-Form?”  
   
Bitty rolled his eyes. “Guess if it’s got roots in battling it’s okay.” He snickered as something else occurred to him. “Besides, I’d like to see some of those boys from my high school who couldn’t pull energy out of a branch if it snapped them in the face, try and tell someone, like, I dunno, _Jack_ for instance, that Conduit-Form Energy Matches were girly. Haha.”   
   
“Not,” Shitty said, stealing a cupcake and taking a hearty bite, hangover be damned, “that there’s anything wrong with that.”  
   
Catching his eye, Bitty wiped his wet hands on his apron. He nodded solemnly. “Not at all.”  
   
   
#  
   
   
Fall semester came to an end, and they had returned from their winter break before Shitty let something slip. To be fair, Bitty supposed that he hadn’t stipulated _don’t tell the rest of the team_ , only not to tell _Jack._ And anyway, he and Jack were getting along—well, maybe swimmingly wasn’t quite the word, but better than before. Or at least, Jack didn’t look like he wanted to murder him after every practice, and he was still getting up early to help Bitty, so that had to count for something, right?  
   
Point being, he was in the center of the match rink, on the ice, trying to practice his water-ice transition, when Ransom slid up next to him.   
   
“Bits,” he said, breaking Bitty’s concentration and allowing a poof of green to splash down around them. “We need you to settle a bet.”  
   
“Huh?” Bitty turned to him, and then to Holster, who had followed Ransom over. “What do you mean?”  
   
Ransom jabbed his thumb at Holster and said, “Holtzy over there thinks your Dance Conduit was _tree_ because you’re from the south.”  
   
“My—?”  
   
“They have a lot of trees in the south, _Rans_. Okay?”  
   
Bitty held up his hands. “Y’all—”  
   
“So? Everywhere has trees.”  
   
Holster wagged a finger. “The Arctic tundra is, in fact, treeless.”  
   
“Dude,” said Ransom. “It’s Bitty. Not Nanook of the motherfucking North.”  
   
“It’s not sand,” said Shitty, joining them. “No offense, Bits.”  
   
Bitty cast a despairing look at the sand flats on either end of the rink. “None taken. Believe me, I _know_ sand isn’t anywhere near my element.”  
   
Ransom and Holster, who, despite their current disagreement, had shared a congratulatory fistbump at the mention of their defensive Conduit, patted Bitty on the back.  
   
“It’s okay, Bits.”  
   
“No one can be good at everything.”  
   
“Jack’s good at everything.”  
   
“Jack’s good at _ice_ , bro. That’s why he’s a center.”  
   
“But you did do tree, right, Bits?”  
   
“Seriously, Holtzy? He’s playing on the line with Jack, not strapped in the framework with Johnson.”  
   
Bitty pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Look, I don’t know how you boys learned about it—”  
   
“Shitty,” Ransom and Holster said, simultaneously.  
   
For what it was worth, Shitty did look a little apologetic when Bitty narrowed his eyes at him. “They asked,” he said. “I was weak.”  
   
“You’ve got a fan now, Bitty,” Holster told him, ruffling Bitty’s hair. “Don’t worry, it’s sweet as fuck.”  
   
Bitty swatted him away. “Stop it, you. Honestly.” He huffed. “Like a bunch of toddlers, I swear.”   
   
Ransom grinned at him. “So? Which one was it? Sand, sea, ice or tree?”  
   
Mouth twisting, Bitty looked from one eager face to another. “Ice,” he admitted. “Sorry, Holster.”  
   
“Ha!” Ransom prodded Holster in the chest. “Told you. Time to pay up, bro.”  
   
“Oh, come on, Rans. You guessed _water_.”  
   
“Close enough.”  
   
“They’re totally different structures, dude.”  
   
“So? Same molecules.”  
   
“So?”  
   
“So?”  
   
“Ice?” Shitty was musing. He stroked his mustache. “Didn’t think that’d be popular down there.”  
   
“None of it was popular,” Bitty reminded him. He shrugged. “My coach was from Russia, so that was the one she knew best is all. I picked it up from her.” He stepped slightly to the right to avoid the wrestling match between Ransom and Holster that had ensued behind him.  
   
“Wait, so can we— _ow, Holster_ —can we see some?”  
   
“What?” Certain he had misheard, Bitty turned to them. Ransom was half in and half out of a headlock. Farther away, Holster’s outer jacket splayed out across the ice, sleeve partially dipped in the water lapping at the edges of the ice field. He pivoted back to look at Shitty, whose mouth was wide in amusement. “Are you serious?”  
   
“Sure.” As if to prove his point, Shitty plopped down cross-legged right in front of him on the ice. “Go for it. I’ve never seen high-level Dance before.”  
   
“Uh…” Bitty rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m kinda out of practice? I mean, it’s been literal years, boys.”  
   
Ransom and Holster had followed Shitty down to the ground, rearranging themselves on either side of him. Bitty flushed as all three of them turned identical beseeching eyes on him.   
   
“Oh, for—” Bitty sighed, shaking his head. Ransom and Holster even had their hands in their laps. “You’re embarrassing me.” He snuck a glance at the rest of the team to see if they were watching, but most of them seemed to have congregated off the rink, near the entrance to the locker rooms. He let out another breath, crossing his arms self-consciously in front of his chest. “If I show you something, will that get you to leave me alone?”  
   
“Come on, Bitty,” Holster wheedled. “We need to know what our littlest bro is capable of.”  
   
Bitty pressed his lips together. “You can’t make fun.”  
   
“Make fun of what?”   
   
Startled at the new voice directly behind him, Bitty yelped, pressing a hand to his chest. “Lardo!”  
   
“Make fun of what?” Lardo repeated. She spotted the other three sitting on the ice, hands neatly folded, gazing up at Bitty, who passed a hand over his face, cheeks turning even redder. He’d barely had a week to get to know their new manager, and this was about to be her first impression of him? “You putting on a show, Bittle?”  
   
“Uh…”  
   
Shitty patted the ice in front of him. “Bits used to do Dance Magic,” he said. “Have a seat, Lards.”  
   
“Really?” Lardo’s eyebrows went up. “No kidding.” She considered the ice before her, then plopped herself down on Shitty’s lap. “Okay then. Hit it, Bitty.”  
   
Now confronted with _four_ sets of inquisitive eyes, Bitty had little choice but to acquiesce. He took a deep breath. “This might be really bad,” he warned.  
   
“Bitty, you literally could do anything even remotely related to Dance Magic and we’d still think it was awesome because we have no idea what we’re looking at.”  
   
A corner of Bitty’s mouth quirked up at that. “True.” He nodded to himself, suddenly decisive. “Okay, so, quick background: if C-Form is like, using the four Conduits to pass and amplify our own energies—or block the other team’s,” he glanced at Ransom and Holster, “then the Dance is more…I don’t know, using the energy of the Conduit itself?” He frowned. “Sounds weird when you say it like that.”  
   
Lardo flapped a dismissive hand at him. “Whatever, Bittle. We don’t care about the quantum physics of it.”  
   
“Okay, okay.” Bitty took a deep breath. “So I’m just gonna do a basic—a basic ice form. Like a spin, okay?” He hazarded a peek. They were still watching him placidly, Holster had started to crack his knuckles, Ransom was drawing something on the ice with his fingers. “Okay,” he said again. “A spin.”  
   
The first thing Bitty did was step away from his audience another few feet. Distance achieved, he crouched down and placed his hands on the ice, palms flat to make for the most surface contact possible.   
   
The thing about C-Form was, Bitty thought, as he closed his eyes and began to regulate his breathing, you couldn’t go too deep. You had to skim the surface of the Conduits, because you needed to be able to focus on what the rest of your teammates were doing, focus on the real world.  
   
The Dance was different.  
   
Bitty sucked in a breath as he felt himself break through the Conduit barrier. Samwell didn’t have Dance, so the Conduits only got used for C-Form and the occasional physics assignment. Breaking through a virgin Conduit was not unlike smashing a window. It made Bitty’s breath catch and his heart thrum wildly. Even so, he kept his touch light, his connection relatively shallow. He didn’t plan on doing any tricks that required a deeper connection, and there was always that risk of going too far, especially without Katya keeping an eye on him.  
   
He didn’t want to get stuck.  
   
He knew, distantly, that he was still crouched on top of the ice, that the palms of his hands and the metal studs of his shoes were the only things _really_ conducting, but the rest of him, the important part of him, was somewhere else. Below his body. Around him. Like a master directing a puppet, he told his legs to straighten, and he rose. When his fingertips left the ground, the ice came with him.  
   
Away, far away, Bitty heard what must have been the gasps of his friends. It was a sight, he knew. C-Form played with your own energy, borrowed some from the Conduit, melded with your teammates’. But now, Bitty was melded with something else instead.   
   
From his memories of watching Katya do this, he knew they were seeing him surrounded by what looked like a curtain of blue crystal dangling from his fingertips. When it caught the light just right— _“Spin_ ,” he whispered, and pushed off one leg, letting the acceleration of the energy at his fingers, at his feet, whip him in a circle.   
   
He brought his hands up, pointed his open fingers towards the sky, and the blue rose with him, surrounding him, glittering shards the energy-shadow of the actual element. He spun faster and faster, three more breaths, and then brought his arms sharply down again.  
   
The curtain of energy crashed into the ground, folding in on itself like waves breaking, catching the light from the ceiling and shattering into thousands of rainbow pieces.  
   
Bitty’s spin slowed to a stop. “Whew,” he said, wiping his brow. “Takes a lot out of you.” He chanced a bow.  
   
Another moment of silence, where he tried not to sweat too obviously, or look at his friends, and then—  
   
“Holy shit, Bits!” Shitty was on his feet, clapping and whistling. “That was ‘swasome!”  
   
“Goddamn,” Holster said.  
   
“Fuck,” Ransom agreed.  
   
“That was pretty sweet, bro.” Lardo offered him a small smile. “You said you were out of practice?”  
   
“I, uh.” Bitty lifted his hands to his burning cheeks as the other three continued to make an appreciative ruckus. “Oh, look, now you’re just being embarrassing.”  
   
“Man, we’ve gotta make that into a play somehow,” Holster said. He thumbed at Ransom. “Yale would _shit bricks_.”  
   
“I can only do it with ice, y’all,” said Bitty. “I’m real bad at the other ones.” He tilted his head. “Water’s okay, I guess. Similar.”  
   
“See?” Ransom hissed. “Told you.”   
   
Shitty linked a companionable arm through Bitty’s. “Bitty, my dude,” he said. “You’re no longer to be called Bitty. I’m calling you Princess Elsa from now on.”  
   
“Shitty.” Bitty gave him a reproachful look. “You said you wouldn’t make fun.”  
   
“Man, Princess Elsa’s like, the most badass,” Holster said. “Nine out of ten five-year-old girls agree.”  
   
Bitty shook his head. “I’m not growing ice castles and bringing snow monsters to life. It’s just energy, it’s—” he stopped talking abruptly, his attention arrested by something on the far end of the rink. “Oh,” said Bitty, very conscious of how the rest of his group was suddenly quiet. “Hi there, Jack.”  
   
 


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**  
   
   
“Bittle,” said Jack. He stepped away from where he had been hidden by the height and shadow of the bleachers. He was still wearing his practice uniform.  
   
“I uh,” said Bitty, wilting a little beneath Jack’s piercing stare. But as Jack continued to eye him, still saying nothing, Bitty’s nervousness turned slowly to irritation. He gave himself a mental shake. So what if Jack had seen? Shitty thought it was cool. Ransom, Holster, and Lardo had liked it. And did Jack really have to just stand there staring? It was getting to be kind of rude.  
   
“Jackie boy,” said Shitty finally. He dropped his arm from where it had been looped in with Bitty’s, smoothly stepping between Bitty and Jack. “What did you think of Bittle’s moves? ‘Swasomely sweet, huh?”  
   
Jack folded his arms. He directed his words towards Bitty. “You’re not supposed to be messing around like that with the Conduits. They’re not reinforced.”  
   
Bitty lifted his chin, nostrils flaring. “I’m not going to break your Conduits, Jack. Give me some credit.”  
   
“Whoa,” said Holster. “You can break the Conduits like that?”  
   
“Yes,” Jack grit out, while at the same time Bitty said sharply,  
   
“ _No_.”  
   
They glared at each other.  
   
“Ookay,” said Shitty slowly. “Why don’t we just take Bitty’s word that he knows how not to fuck up the Conduits, and go shower and shit, okay?” He placed a hand on one each of Jack and Bitty’s shoulders. “C’mon, boys. Bitty gave a sweet show, and if we ask him to do it again, we’ll make sure it’s on a reinforced field, okay?” He propelled them forward. “Okay.”  
   
Bitty let himself be moved, but Jack shrugged Shitty’s hand away. “I have to take care of some stuff,” he said curtly. “Sorry.”  
   
Shitty scratched his head, watching as Jack strode off, back stiff, face like a thundercloud. “Alrighty then,” he said after another moment of uncomfortable silence. “No shower for Jack.”  
   
“No shower for me, either.” Lardo shoved her hands in her pockets. “No offense.”  
   
“None taken,” Shitty said breezily. He removed his hand from Bitty’s shoulder to indicate the entrance to the locker room. “Shall we, gentlemen?”  
   
“Shitty,” Bitty said, when they were safely ensconced in the locker room, and Bitty was reasonably sure that Jack wasn’t lurking somewhere around the corner. “Why is Jack so—so—ugh.” Bitty scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “Why?”  
   
The other three exchanged glances.  
   
“Jack really cares about the team,” Holster started, tentatively.  
   
“He hates me.  
   
“He doesn’t hate you.” Shitty patted his knee. “Jack’s just a nut. Don’t take it personally.”  
   
“Kind of hard not to,” Bitty muttered darkly. He sat on one of the wooden benches and pulled off first one cloth shoe and then the other, running his fingers along the eight metal cleats at the sole, feeling for any roughness. Exhaling, he leaned back against the cold wall of orange-painted lockers. “It’s just a game, for heaven sakes.”  
   
Shitty shifted, folding one leg on top of the other. He spread his hands. “It’s just a game to you and me,” he said, “but when a dude’s raised in an old school Gym? A dude’s gonna revert to some old school training once in a while. He’ll get his head out of his ass eventually.”  
   
Bitty frowned, straightening to blink at him. “I didn’t know he grew up in a Gym.”  
   
“Dude,” said Ransom, eyebrows going up. “Not _a_ Gym _. The_ Gym.”  
   
Bitty gave him a very blank look.  
   
“Jack’s a Zimmermann, man,” Holster said. “They run the most hardcore, old-school C-Form-As-A-Battle-Art-And-Not-A-Game Gym in Canada. Like, meditating in waterfalls naked and shit, running up mountains barefoot shit.”  
   
“Oh, come on, he did not,” Bitty objected. He looked around at the others, who were all nodding. “You’re pulling my leg.”  
   
“Nah, dude.” Holster held up his hand. “Swear to god.”  
   
“Huh.” Bitty frowned. He toyed with the laces on his shoes some more. “But then,” he said. “I thought—I mean, what’s he doing here playing with us?”  
   
It was Ransom who shrugged. “Man,” he said. “Gym politics or family politics or some shit. I’m not gonna ask.”  
   
“I asked him once when I was like, so drunk.” Holster leaned forward, hands on his knees.  
   
“What’d he say?”  
   
Holster shrugged. “Dude just walked away. Didn’t answer shit.”  
   
Bitty snorted. “Sounds like Jack.” He took a deep breath. “Well, whatever it was,” he said firmly, “doesn’t excuse him being so rude all the time.” He crossed his arms.  
   
“Yeah, Bits,” Shitty sighed. “We’re not saying you’re wrong. Just—you know.” He gestured. “Trying to give you some context and shit.”  
   
Bitty nodded. “I guess,” he said. He stood up and leaned over to fiddle with his locker. Opening it, he tossed in his practice shoes, then pulled off his jacket and jersey.  
   
“He’s a delicate flower, Bits.” Shitty was already almost naked, stripped down to his yellow and black honeybee boxers. He propped himself up against the wall of lockers with his elbow. “Thorny but beautiful.”  
   
Bitty bit his lip to hold back a smile. He was still mad, damn it. “I bet he’d love to hear that, Shitty.”  
   
“Brah.” Shitty sounded quite offended. “I tell him that every day.”  
   
“True poetry, man.” Ransom slapped Shitty on the back, hitching up his towel. “He doesn’t deserve you.”  
   
“Oh lord,” said Bitty.  
   
“You’re right, he doesn’t. I should divorce him.”  
   
“I’m going to shower,” said Bitty, loudly. He walked off, shaking his head, while Shitty continued to wax poetic, to Ransom and Holster’s loud encouragement.  
   
   
#  
   
   
Given what had happened, at the very least, Bitty didn’t expect to see Jack again until team breakfast. So it was with great surprise that, just like every other Thursday for the past few months, there was a resounding knock at his door in the wee hours of the morning.  
   
For a brief, vindictive second, Bitty considered ignoring it.  
   
In the end, what ultimately convinced him not to was less of a sense of politeness, and more of a cold, hard certainty that Jack would keep knocking until either Bitty’s roommate got up to let him in, or the door fell down.  
   
Bitty sat up in bed and hissed as a cold wave of air washed over him. Draping the blanket around his shoulders like a cape, he tottered over to the door and opened it.  
   
“Bittle,” said Jack, just like every morning.  
   
“Jack.”  
   
“We have—” he tilted his head curiously, eyes traveling over the comforter fluffed up around Bitty’s neck to his chin, tufts of hair poking ever which way. “Are you really that cold?”  
   
Bitty narrowed his eyes, drawing the comforter even more tightly around himself. “I’m going to pretend that you didn’t try and chirp me at five in the morning.”  
   
“It’s really not that cold.”  
   
“It’s January,” Bitty told him, and shut the door in Jack’s face. He did open it a second later to add, “Let me put on sweats,” but Jack still looked surprised. Bitty thought that he might cherish that particular expression for the rest of his days.  
   
Bitty really wanted to take his time and make Jack wait, but he also wanted to eat breakfast at a reasonable hour and he knew Jack wasn’t above keeping them at the rink if necessary, so he hurried as he threw on a pair of sweats, then a long sleeved shirt, a sweater, and a jacket. He toed his shoes on by the doorway and emerged properly bundled and no less grumpy.  
   
Jack, who’d been leaning against the wall, fiddling with his water bottle, straightened when Bitty shut the door.  
   
They set off towards the rink in silence. It had snowed a few days ago, and while the sidewalks had been salted, the grass was still covered in an icy layer of white. Despite the bulk of his clothes, Bitty shivered as his breath formed mist in front of him. Jack, clad only in a light jacket and a Samwell baseball cap, didn’t seem affected at all.  
   
Only when the walk to the rink was over did Bitty start to wonder if perhaps he should have been worrying about the upcoming practice. He trusted Jack, of course, C-Form wasn’t possible at all without some kind of trust, but there was that small, nagging voice in the back of his mind. Maybe Jack would want to get back at him or something for what he’d said? Or maybe try to run him even harder, make him quit the team? Or maybe—  
   
“Bittle.”  
   
Bitty looked up. Jack was closer than he’d thought. In the dark of the hallway outside the locker room, his blue eyes looked dark, his cheekbones cut from shadow. “Huh?”  
   
“I asked if you were okay. You’ve kind of, um…been staring at the door.”  
   
“Oh,” said Bitty. That…was definitely not at all what he had been expecting. He wet dry lips, trying on a smile. It came out a bit wobbly, but Jack seemed satisfied. “I’m good. Just tired.” He reached for the door. “Let me just get my stuff on.” He pulled at the handle, acutely aware of Jack’s gaze on him.  
   
The weirdest thing about their practice, Bitty decided, almost an hour into it, was just how not-weird it was. Bitty squared up, or picked a stance, or made a pass of some energy to a nonexistent teammate, and Jack tossed bolts of sizzling blue at him from all angles, at all intensities. It was so damn disarmingly normal, that when they were picking up and trooping off the ice field, Bitty was completely blindsided when Jack cleared his throat.  
   
“Um,” he said. “Shitty told me I’ve been, um. Kind of been being a dick.”  
   
Slowly, holding his gloves and jacket, Bitty rotated to look at him, certain he had misheard. “I’m sorry?”  
   
Of all the things, Jack flushed. He also looked liked he rather regretted saying anything at all. “Yes,” he muttered after another moment. “So, uh. Yeah.”  
   
“Yeah?” Bitty echoed.  
   
Jack heaved a sigh. He determinately avoided Bitty’s face, looking off somewhere over his left shoulder as he said, like the words were being pulled slowly and painfully out of him. “So. My bad. I’ll try not to be. Any more.”  
   
Bitty squinted. “You’ll try not to be a dick.”  
   
“Yes.”  
   
“O—okay?” Bitty stood there for a moment longer, suddenly unsure what to do with his hands (still holding his gloves and shirt) or his gaze, or anything, really. He opened his mouth, shut it, then hummed.  
   
“What?”  
   
“Oh, um.” Bitty bit his lip. “Nothing.”  
   
“Really?”  
   
“Yeah.”  
   
“Okay.”  
   
The awkward silence matured into an unbearable one. Bitty cleared his throat.  
   
“You know, I just remembered I’ve uh.” He coughed. “I’ve got a test this morning I was supposed to study for and, uh, you know, being me I baked that batch of cookies instead, then the apple bread after that, so I, um.” He hooked his thumb in the vague direction of the exit. “I’ve really gotta go, um. But, uh.” He looked up, just in time to catch Jack staring at him, kind of like he was afraid of setting off a small bomb if he moved an inch. Bitty forced another smile. “Thanks for the practice, though. Of course, like always. Really, uh, really, _super_ helpful. Really.” He tripped backwards on his way towards the door. “Um, see you later though?”  
   
Jack nodded stiffly. “Later, Bittle.”  
   
Bitty managed to free one hand enough for one more awkward wave, before vanishing into the lockers. He didn’t bother with a shower or changing out of his smelly practice clothes, just tugged his jacket on, pulled his hat over his head, and beat it before Jack got any ideas about following him.  
   
   
#  
   
   
Bitty certainly did have a test (a small quiz, really) but he definitely did not return to his room to study for it. He tried, but the words on the page kept swimming in front of his eyes, rearranging themselves into weird combinations that looked uncannily like “my bad” and “I won’t be a dick anymore.” If it hadn’t been for the required student-athlete grade point average, Bitty would have skipped the class entirely.  
   
Afternoon practice, which Bitty remembered to dread just in time for it to start, was a whole other bucket of fish.  
   
Whether or not he really wanted to admit it, Jack had turned out to be a pretty decent coach. Bitty’s shields were sharper than ever, he could throw them up one moment to block, and pull the energy from the ice at his feet and toss it out to Jack the next. Jack was a genius with it. He knew exactly where to direct it to break the other team’s framework, the exact intensity, the exact spacing between strikes. All Bitty had to do was power him up and deflect the other side’s shots.  
   
Obviously, Bitty was significantly better at one of these things than the other, but he liked to think he’d improved at least a little bit. The coaches certainly seemed to think so. In the first round, while Ransom and Holster hung back to dig their heels into the sand and hold up Johnson’s framework, they set Bitty on Jack’s right, Einhardt on his left.  
   
Coach Hall pursed his lips. “Here’s how this play’s going to work, boys.” He pointed at Jack, then Bittle. “Bittle, you’re going to focus on giving him everything you can get from the Conduit. That means you’ve got to move fast and close, make sure the opposition can’t throw a wall between you. Got it?”  
   
“Yessir.” He pretended not to notice when Jack threw him a look, the lines on his forehead already creasing.  
   
“Great. Einhardt, your job is to draw their fire, make sure they can’t touch either of your linemates.”  
   
“Got it, Coach.”  
   
“Coach—” Jack started, still frowning, but Coach Hall was already moving on.  
   
“I don’t need to tell you this is a riskier play then the typical power-up and block switch off, so I need you boys to get it down pat before the next match.” He consulted something on the clipboard in his hands, flipping the papers, scribbling something down in the margins. “The idea is to give Jack a near-constant stream of energy so he can take one shot after another, but we can only do that if Bittle can feed it to him, and we can only do _that_ if Einhardt keeps _him_ from being interrupted. Capisce? Jack?”  
   
Jack had closed his mouth, but he still didn’t look too happy. “Got it, Coach.”  
   
They started the first test play without any opposition on the other side, though their backup goalie did dust himself off and settle into the framework. Bitty watched as tendrils of green and brown wrapped around his wrists and ankles, holding him in the box.   
   
Bitty had nothing but respect for the goalies, but no way in hell could he understand their willingness to make not just their energies, but also their physical bodies part of the whole team’s Conduit framework.  
   
Once, when Johnson had been very stoned, he’d told Bitty that there was almost a high to it. Even when there was that unpleasant shock of the framework being broken through by the other team, there was a euphoria to being connected to all the Conduits, all your teammates, being the one to hold them together at the final line, like you were more than just yourself.   
   
Imagining it, Bitty had shuddered. Johnson blew out a ring of smoke, resting back against the tree trunk. He’d opened wide, sightless white eyes and added,   
   
“Course, my specialty is _seeing all_ , in this case, all universes, really—not just this one. So I suppose I’m particularly and uniquely qualified for the framework mindfuck.” He exhaled, the lines of his body long and relaxed. “Next year’s model is a trip and a half, too.”  
   
At the time, having known Johnson for several weeks at that point, Bitty had been growing used to his unnerving predictions, but he still changed the subject.  
   
When they were given the signal to start the play and the elongate diamond shape of the ice field gave way to water-threaded sand, Bitty grimaced but kept in Jack's shadow. He made sure to skirt the edges of the sand, dipping his foot or hand into water with every new form, every crouch, every hand movement designed to pull energy up from the Conduits, reflect it off the ice, toss it to Jack.  
   
When Bitty had met Jack way back in early August, his assumption had been that stylistically, Jack would follow the stronger, harder schools. He’d envisioned lots of planting of two feet on the ground, directing clear and hard hits, his blocks stiff and rectangular. As it turned out, while that had been much closer to what Holster did, better suited as it was for digging in behind the defensive line, Jack was actually quite fluid.  
   
His steps were light and quick, the movements from one form to the next blending, barely a breath between. Bitty fed him one stream of energy, refueled with a dip backward and a foot in the water, and tossed him another. Jack accepted it with a curl of the fingers. Bitty felt the tingle down his arm as their energies meshed for a moment in a pull of green, then Jack was stomping his right foot down, kicking his left leg out towards the base of the vine-entwined goalie framework, while his other hands shot energy up and out in a one-two punch.  
   
The framework broke.  
   
Jack dropped his left foot back down and his arms fell to his sides. He breathed heavily through his nose for a moment, swiping away damp hair from his sweaty forehead. Unintentionally, his eyes met Bitty's near the ice-sand border. It might have been a trick of the light, but he almost looked pleased.  
   
"Good, boys," Coach Hall called from the outer edge of the rink. "Let's try that a few more times. Bittle, I want you to try and be a bit less predictable in where you're going to be in relation to Zimmermann. Zimmermann, if he's going to do that, you need to be keeping extra tabs on him. He's got to be your constant battery, got it?"  
   
Jack and Bitty both nodded. Bitty bit his lip. "Got it."  
   
They practiced the play another three times before the coaches brought on Shitty and his line to play their offense.  
   
Just having someone staring them down at the other end was enough to change the feeling of the play. Suddenly Bitty wasn’t just having to worry about getting to Jack at just the right moment, he was also having to worry about Shitty throwing ropes of energy at his knees, trying to break his balance and cut them off from one another.   
   
By the end of the practice, Bitty was gasping, his limbs trembling and tingly all over from the constant flow of energy. His hair felt like it was standing on end, and he figured it was a fifty-fifty chance that the next run through, one of Shitty’s ropes was going to throw him ass over teakettle into the water, before the coaches finally called an end to the day.  
   
He was all set to dive into the showers and possibly never leave, when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. Bitty jumped, not only because of the surprise, but because of the light static shock that accompanied it.  
   
"Oh," said Jack, wincing. "Um. Sorry."  
   
"’S okay," Bitty managed. He turned, and had to bite back a smile. Jack Zimmerman, standing tall and straight, also had a mass of spiky hair doing the exact same thing. He looked like he was ready for a rock concert.  
   
Jack opened his mouth, then frowned, noticing Bitty’s failed efforts to keep his face neutral.   
   
"What?"  
   
"Your uh, your hair," Bitty choked, and finally let loose a high giggle.   
   
Alarmed, Jack's eyebrows shot up. He reached to pat his head, trying to flatten his hair. His expression turned wry. "Thanks, Bittle."  
   
"Ha," said Bitty. He tucked his hands into his back pockets. "No problem."  
   
Jack nodded. He toyed with the hem of his jersey for a moment, lingering like he still wanted to say something.  
   
"So," started Bitty.  
   
"Um," said Jack, at the same exact moment. He looked startled, then his cheeks flushed. Bitty closed his mouth. "You, um." Jack shrugged, reaching out to tap almost gingerly at Bitty's shoulder again. "Not bad today, Bittle."   
   
"Oh," said Bitty. He felt his own cheeks heat. "Uh, thanks." He smiled, a bit nervous. "Thanks, Jack."  
   
Jack inclined his head. "Still have to work on your hits, but." He lifted his shoulders again, nearly hunched around his ears. "It was a decent play."  
   
A decent play. Honestly. Bitty smiled for real that time. "Okay, Jack." He tilted his head downward, smiled wider at his shoes.   
   
"Okay."  
   
After another few moments passed and neither of them seemed quite sure who ought to move first, Bitty glanced up again. "Do you," he began, but he was interrupted by a bellow over at the gate.  
   
"Come on, losers!" Holster waved at them. "We're getting pizza!"  
   
Bitty shook his head, letting the rest of what he had been about to say disappear from his tongue. He quirked an eyebrow at Jack. "Pizza?" he suggested, half expecting Jack to refuse. But instead, the corners of Jack’s mouth ticked upwards.  
   
"Yeah, okay," he said. "Sounds good."  
   
Would wonders never cease, Bitty thought, as they began to walk together towards Shitty and the rest of the team.   
   
   
#  
   
   
The snow and ice of January gave way to slush in late February, then dirtier slush come early March. With the march of the seasons came more matches, then midterms, and Bitty still had just about zero idea what his major was, but even if none of his classes were technically ‘major courses’ at this point, he was still exhausted. He had spent the past week living mostly in sweatpants, old t-shirts, and sweatshirts that somehow always had at least one streak of flour on them, even if they’d come straight from the wash.  
   
Lardo’s sophomore art show, Bitty thought, as he surveyed himself in the full-length mirror, was just the kind of pick-me-up, dress-me-up that he needed. He looked at himself again, humming in approval at the navy suit and pale pink shirt. He adjusted his bowtie one more time, slicked away that one, annoying cowlick, and reached for the door, shiny black shoes clacking.  
   
Though Shitty had made it abundantly clear that any member of Samwell’s C-Form team who was caught underdressed or ducking out of Lardo’s show risked a lingering and humiliating end to their team career, Bitty was sure that everyone would have turned up anyway. Lardo had that effect on people. Besides, there were supposed to be some sort of snacks involved, and lord knew any athlete worth their salt never turned down the chance for a free meal.  
   
Rather than the brick and questionably stable art building, the show had, as Lardo explained, ‘classed it up a bit’ and was taking place in one of the nicer alumni reception halls on campus.  When Bitty got there, it wasn’t difficult to spot the clusters of vaguely ill-at-ease C-Formers, tugging at cufflinks here, loosening ties there. But despite their awkward, careful lumbering around paintings and pottery and what Bitty was ninety-five percent sure was a sculpture, he did think that as a group, they cleaned up rather well.  
   
“Enjoying the show, Bits?” Shitty sidled up to him, plastic cup of punch in hand. Bitty wondered if it was spiked. Shitty’s mustache had clearly been tended to. With his hair slicked back and his dark blazer, he cut an almost dashing figure. Shitty beamed when Bitty told him so. He smoothed his hand over his mustache, eyes dancing. “I’m flattered, my dude.”  
   
“You should be, Shitty.” Bitty fingered the material of his blazer. “This is nice, why don’t you wear nice stuff like this more often?”  
   
Shitty shuddered. “You know what they say about the apples falling not far from trees, man. I dress like this daily and I’m liable to just pluck the damn thing off the branch and set it down next to the trunk myself. Which just so happens to be my own personal nightmare.”  
   
Bitty pouted. “I don’t think that’s a very fair metaphor.”  
   
“It’s also damnably hot.” Shitty tugged at his collar.  
   
Bitty grimaced sympathetically. “Now that, I can understand. Though how you can think so just in March is beyond me.” They began to wander off in the direction of the rest of the art. “Where’s Lardo?”  
   
“Oh, you know.” Shitty waved vaguely. He also snagged a glass of punch off of a green-clothed table and passed it to Bitty, who murmured his thanks and sipped it. From the taste, he was pretty sure it was just kool-aid mixed with lemonaid, but there were some chunks of actual fruit floating in there, which was a nice touch. “The artist must wander from admirer to admirer. Like a bee in a garden.”  
   
Bitty swallowed a piece of tiny floating strawberry and put the cup down to regard him suspiciously. “Did you put something in your drink?”  
   
“Bitty.” Shitty sounded wounded. He placed a hand on his heart. “A bro does not spike his drink at his other bro’s art show. That would be _crass_. We face this like men.”  
   
“Um, okay?”  
   
“Rans and Holtzy and I did pregame a little bit though.”  
   
Bitty massaged his temples. “Of course you did.”  
   
“I also may or may not have a flask.” Shitted patted his thigh, where the side pocket of his slacks bulged suspiciously.  
   
Bitty tried not to roll his eyes too obviously. “Of course you do.”  
   
“Oh hey, look there.” Shitty grabbed him by the shoulder. He pointed at a painting on the nearby wall. “That’s one of hers.”  
   
Retrieving his cup and walking over, Bitty squinted at the painting. It was nearly as tall as he was, and twice as wide. He took in the diamond center, the leaves curling around the edges of the large oval, and the splashes of strategically placed blue and green and yellow. He tilted his head. “Looks kind of like a…”  
   
“It’s a C-Form rink.”  
   
Bitty did his best not to drop his drink, but it was a near thing. “Jack!” he said, strangled. He clutched his heart. “Someone ought to put a bell on you.”  
   
Jack blinked at him. “Sorry,” he said, after a beat. “Did I startle you?”  
   
“Lord have mercy,” Bitty huffed, and took a long gulp of the punch, half-wishing he could ask Shitty for the flask instead. Shitty was busy gazing at the painting however, brow creased, lips pursed.  
   
“Now, I’m not going to say that I can’t see it.” He folded his arms, wagging a finger at Jack. “But you do see C-Form rinks in like, the burn patterns on your toast, my pal, so I am just a little skeptical.”  
   
Jack pointed at the sign.  
   
“Oh,” said Shitty, bending down to read it. He cleared his throat. “An impressionist vision of a C-Form rink. Well, what do you know.”  
   
Bitty’s eyebrows drew together. “I don’t understand why the ice diamond is lavender.”  
   
“No,” Shitty admitted, “but it does mesh nicely with the sand and the water, doesn’t it?”  
   
“I like the way she did the texture on the sand.” Bitty traced the air in front of the painting with a finger, lingering on sand-colored corners extending out from the defensive zones. “It’s sparkly.”  
   
“The Frameworks could use more green.”  
   
“It’s a _vision_ , Jack, not a diagram. Fuck’s sake.”  
   
“I’m just saying. I do like it otherwise.”  
   
Bitty tapped his foot. “Do you think Lardo sells her pieces? Can you do that at a university?”  
   
“Probably not before final grades are in,” Shitty said, but then he brightened. “Maybe we can get her to donate it to the Haus.”  
   
“Wouldn’t she want to take it with her when she graduates?”  
   
“Don’t be such a party pooper, Zimmermann.” Shitty suddenly cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, Lards!” He waved as several people swiveled their heads to glare at them.  
   
“Sup, Shits?” Lardo said, stepping over to them. She had actually been quite close, but hidden behind a large and misshapen imitation of a Mycenaean vase, which was why Bitty hadn’t spotted her before then. “Hey, Bitty, Jack. Glad you made it.”  
   
To Bitty’s surprise, it was actually Jack who said, “Of course we made it, Lardo.” He then followed it up with, “You’re part of the team. We have to support you.” Which was a little less surprising, but Bitty supposed it was a nice sentiment nonetheless.  
   
“Aw, that might be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”  
   
Shitty put his hand on his heart. “It’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to _me_ , and you didn’t even say it to me.”    
   
Jack frowned. “It’s true,” he said, like it was obvious.  
   
“No,” Shitty said. He pointed a finger at Jack. “ _You’re_ true. A true gentleman, my good sir.”  
   
Jack sputtered.  
   
“I love your skirt,” Bitty said, taking Lardo aside. Shitty and Jack’s conversation looked like it had the potential to devolve significantly.  
   
She smiled at him and smoothed down the fabric. It swayed lightly just above the knee, patterned with little lightening bolts on a dark blue field. “Thanks. I made it last week.”  
   
“I helped with the pleats,” Shitty jumped in.  
   
“You did not,” Bitty said. “That’s amazing.” He shook his head. “My mama tried to get me to learn to sew so I could at least help her with my own costumes. It was an abysmal failure in every way.”  
   
“Lucky for us you’re better at baking.” Shitty draped himself over Lardo’s shoulders. “Lards, my favorite—”  
   
“I thought I was your favorite.”  
   
“Shut up, Jack,” Shitty said, while Bitty boggled. Had that been an actual, literal joke from Jack Zimmermann? No. He must have misheard. “Lards, would you consider donating this beautiful piece to the Haus to live there ever after as a monument to true, artistic vision and also the beautiful game of C-Form?” He put his chin on top of her head. “It can hang in my room.”  
   
“If it’s going to hang anywhere, it should hang above the fireplace,” Bitty objected. “Then we could all enjoy it.”  
   
“It could get ruined during a Haus party,” Jack said softly. “Lardo, you should keep it.”  
   
Lardo snorted. “I’ll consider your suggestions, gentlemen.” She ducked out from underneath Shitty’s weight, but then linked arms with him instead. “Want to see the rest of the show?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aerlalaith.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

** Chapter 3 **

  
   
It was true that there was a certain rush and a high that came from playing C-Form. However, when the noise and the adrenaline died down and the last of the energy thrumming in his veins buzzed away, it was equally true that Bitty always, always crashed. Hard.  
   
Therefore, if Bitty was being completely honest with himself, what he really wanted to do at that precise moment was nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep for the next twelve hours. Unfortunately, the team bylaws clearly stated that a triumphant C-Form match always needed to be followed by an appropriately triumphant C-Form kegster, which was why, instead of being cozy and in bed, Bitty was leaning against the sticky counter in the Haus kitchen, on his way to becoming very, very drunk.  
   
“Excuse me,” he told the guy who had followed him in there, prattling on about—was it something about taking a tackle from a literal troll? Bitty wasn’t sure, but the guy was constantly swiveling his baseball cap front to back and then front again, and it was really starting to grate, so Bitty beat a hasty retreat back to the living room.  
   
No sooner had he stepped through the threshold however, than he was immediately accosted by Ransom, who grabbed him around the shoulders and subjected him to a congratulatory head rub just to the left of a noogie.  
   
“Bitty!” he crowed. “Your shot today was clutch, son!” He let Bitty go, but held up his hand for a fistbump. “You made Holster even more blind.”  
   
“It was bright, yo.” Lardo saluted him from over at the pong table. Next to her, Holster, tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth, and wearing a pair of incredibly dark and oversized prescription sunglasses, gave him a florid bow.  
   
“A beautiful sacrifice,” he said, hand over heart.  
   
Bitty winced in sympathy. “Sorry about that, Holster,” he said, for what felt like the fifth time since the match ended. “I’ve been trying to get down to lower spectrum, but it just doesn't seem to be working.”  
   
Holster waved him off. “Worth it,” he said, taking a shot at the other side’s cups. He missed by about three feet. He turned to Lardo. “Did it go in?”  
   
She patted his arm. “Holster, no offense, but you’re kind of fucking blind and that makes you a terrible pong partner.”  
   
“Johnson’s blind and he’s great at pong.” Holster stuck out his lower lip. “Let me try again.”  
   
“Seers don’t count.”  
   
Watching them, Ransom blew air out of the corner of his mouth, and shook his head. “Shame upon this Haus. I can’t even watch.”  
   
“I heard that, Rans.” Holster tossed again, this time managing to throw too high and hitting a lax bro in the back of the head. The guy immediately whirled around, face beet red.  
   
“Who the fuck threw that?”  
   
“I take it back,” said Ransom, while Lardo tugged Holster down to explain what he’d hit, cackling all the way. “Well done, Holtzy.”  
   
“I swear to god I will fucking deck whoever threw that at me.”  
   
“Try again, Holtzy,” Lardo ordered, eyes gleaming. “No, higher.”  
   
“I’m just going to go back into the kitchen,” said Bitty, suddenly remembering why he had been in there in the first place. “The cookies.”  
   
“Fuck!” shouted Holster, after Lardo quietly informed him that this time, the ball had somehow ricocheted off the back of the couch to land in one of their own cups.  
   
“Brave soldier.” Ransom took off his hat and held it to his heart. “We mourn his loss.” He pulled his cap back on again. “Oh hey, Bits, if you’re coming back, do you wanna grab me another beer? Keg’s already empty.”  
   
Bitty made it back to Betsy barely in time to rescue the snickerdoodles, pulling them out of the oven just as another roar of noise went up in the living room. He set the cookie sheet on top of the stove to examine them. The bottoms were pushing the edge of charcoal, which was a shame, but Bitty figured that since most everyone in the house was drunk anyway, hopefully no one would notice.  
   
“Oh my god, you made cookies?”  
   
Oh no. Bitty turned around, a pit of dread pooling in his stomach. Troll-tackling rugby boy was back—or else he’d never left. Bitty put on his politest smile. “Sure, take one.”  
   
“They’re kind of burnt on the bottom,” Rugby-boy commented, shoving the whole thing into his mouth anyway.  
   
Bitty’s left eye twitched. “Bless your heart for noticing,” he said.  
   
“Oh, thank you.” The guy swallowed. Bitty very carefully did not bang the tray on the counter as he turned the oven off and began to pile up the cookies on a plate. “So where was I?”  
   
“I really couldn’t say,” said Bitty, who was certainly not drunk enough for this. He headed for the refrigerator, pulling out two beers.  
   
“Oh, that’s a decent IPA, but kind of overrated.” A beat. “Can I have one?”  
   
“No.”  
   
“Oh, come on, man. Why not?”  
   
“They’re Justin’s.”  
   
“I bet he wouldn’t care.”  
   
Bitty snorted. He turned around, about to head for the kitchen exit, when suddenly the guy was there, blocking him.  
   
“I bet he wouldn’t.”  
   
“Oh, he would.”  
   
“Come on, please?”  
   
“Sorry, you’ll have to go for the tub juice,” Bitty said, still aiming to be polite.  Unfortunately, it did absolutely nothing to dissuade the guy. On the contrary, he stepped closer, right up into Bitty’s space.  
   
“What, is he your boyfriend or something?”  
   
“No,” Bitty said, flushing. “He’s just my friend.” He glared. “I need to pass through here, please.”  
   
“I mean,” the guy continued, now eying Bitty thoughtfully through a haze of half-lidded, drunken eyes, “if he’s not, you’re kinda scrawny but,” he smirked, “I’d still be down to hook up or something.”  
   
“ _Excuse me_?” Bitty said incredulously. He puffed himself up. “Get out of my way!”  
   
“Come on, don’t be a bitch—” the guy started to say, but Bitty, who was already tired and pissed, was through. One arm still clutching the beers, he pushed out at the other guy’s chest. He sucked the tiniest bit of cold available from the booze to add an extra kick to his shove, and the guy stumbled back.  
   
“I said, _move_ , mister!”  
   
The guy looked surprised, “What the—” he began, about to take a step back towards Bitty. But then his eyes widened.  
   
And then he threw up all over the floor and Bitty’s shoes.  
   
Bitty shrieked in disgust, leaping backwards to avoid any further encroachments. Within moments, the noise had drawn a considerable crowd, including Ransom and Shitty, who, after high-fiving one-another, shouted,  
   
“Clean up an aisle seven, dude!” and chucked a mop and a container of bleach at the guy, who was still bent over, groaning. They narrowly missed his head and clattered instead to the ground, dangerously close to the puddle of puke.  
   
Meanwhile, Bitty, who had one hundred percent had enough, tucked both beers more firmly into his elbow, and edged his way towards the door. He toed off his ruined shoes and stole a pair of Shitty’s sandals, before stalking off away from the Haus, into the night.  
   
The first thing Bitty regretted, as he sat sullenly on a bench alone by the pond, was that he’d used all of the chill from the bottles and was now forced to drink warm beer.  
   
Warm beer was disgusting.  
   
The second thing, was that, in his bid to escape, he’d left his coat at the Haus. Not a big deal, ostensibly, but his keys were in there, and now he couldn’t get back into his dorm. Bitty shivered.  
   
He threw the first empty beer bottle into the trashcan to the left of the bench, and cracked open the next one, taking a long, bitter swallow. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a couple of the night geese come towards him, red eyes pinpricks in the darkness of the lake.  
   
“Don’t you dare,” he told them, clutching his beer. “This is mine.”  
   
“They’ve been getting aggressive this year, eh?”  
   
Bitty yelped. “Jack!” he gasped, whirling around to spot Jack’s hulking shadow behind him. “Don’t—don’t sneak up on a boy like that! What’s wrong with you?”  
   
Jack came round to the front of the bench, settling himself next to Bitty, though he left a respectable gap of space between them. “Drinking alone?” he said, eyeing the bottle in Bitty’s hand. “I thought you liked to be the life of the party.”  
   
Bitty scowled at him, then glanced down at his stolen sandals. “I have had a very poor evening,” he muttered.  His tongue was starting to feel a little thick. He took another sip.  
   
“Whatever you say, Bittle.” Jack leaned backwards, looking up at the sky.  
   
“A moron threw up on me.”  
   
“That’s rough.”  
   
Bitty kicked at the grass, one of Shitty’s over-large sandals slipping off. “He tried to hit on me and said I was scrawny!” he said indignantly. His lower lip trembled. “What kind of jerk says something like that?”  
   
“What?” Jack sat up again to look at him. It was hard to tell in the dark, but Bitty didn’t think he was laughing, so at least there was that. “Who said that?”  
   
Bitty sniffed, poking his fingers into the gaps between the slats of the bench. “I don't know. Some guy.” His voice was quiet as he added, “I know I’m scrawny, but he didn’t have to go and say it.”  
   
Jack was silent for a moment. “That does sound very…rude.”  
   
Letting out a long and steadying breath, Bitty swiped under his eyes, hoping that Jack couldn’t see. “I’m sorry, Jack. Here I am, ranting to you, and I bet you just came out here to get some quiet or something, huh?”  
   
“What?” Jack looked taken aback. “No, I uh.” He shrugged. “Shitty, um. He saw you leave and said you might’ve been, I guess, upset?”  
   
Bitty blinked. “Oh,” he said quietly.   
   
“Yeah, so.” Jack cleared his throat. “Um.”  
   
“Well.” Bitty looked at the half-empty beer bottle in his hand. “Thanks, I guess.”  
   
“No problem, Bittle.”  
   
Except for the occasional over-zealous honk from a night goose, the night around them was still. The sky had been overcast earlier in the day, but by now the clouds had parted to reveal faint pinpricks of stars and a nearly empty moon. Out of habit, Bitty looked for the only two constellations he could reliably identify: the Big Dipper and Orion’s belt.  
   
“D’you know any constellations?” Bitty asked, before his brain could quite catch up with his mouth. In fact, his mouth seemed quite ready to run off with whatever it saw fit, at this point; he was beginning to recognize the molasses feel of multiple beers well-drunk.  
   
Jack didn’t answer for a moment, and Bitty almost thought maybe he hadn’t heard, before he said, “Cassiopeia, there.” He pointed.  
   
“Where?”  
   
“The W shaped one.”  
   
“Seriously?”  
   
“Yes.”  
   
“Oh, okay.” Bitty drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Any other ones?”  
   
Bitty wasn’t really expecting an answer, so he was surprised when Jack made a quiet noise in the affirmative in the back of his throat. “Ursa Major, Draco, Cancer.” As he spoke, he pointed out each one.  
   
Bitty blinked. “Wow, Jack. I wasn’t, um. That’s real cool that you know all those.”  
   
Jack shrugged. “I took a class on it.”  
   
“Stargazing?” Bitty said, in disbelief. Then he frowned, still squinting upwards. “Where is Orion?”  
   
“Orion’s a winter constellation. It’s kind of faint now, if you can see it. There.”  
   
“Oh,” Bitty said, a little disappointed for some reason. He let the silence stretch on for a few seconds but then, unable to resist, said, “A class?”  
   
“HST 326: Science, Mythology, and Alchemy in Early Greece.”  
   
“Sounds, uh.” Bitty coughed. “Did you like it?”  
   
“It was okay,” said Jack, which Bitty was pretty sure was the equivalent of a ringing endorsement.  
   
“Mmm, just okay?”  
   
“It was hard to stay up late to do some of the homework with practice the next morning.”  
   
Not quite capable of holding it in, Bitty let out a snort, then a little giggle, but Jack didn’t seem offended. On the contrary, the corner of his mouth twitched up.  
   
“It wasn’t that bad.”  
   
Bitty shook his head at him, then peered at the sky some more, trying to suss out the constellations Jack had indicated. He was pretty sure he’d found the W, but the other ones were eluding him. “I didn’t know you were interested in that. I thought you were more, like, modern history.”  
   
“The other classes were full. It was the only one that fit in my schedule.”  
   
Bitty huffed out a laugh. “Do you schedule _everything_ around C-Form?”  
   
“No. Well. Maybe.”  
   
“I can’t imagine,” said Bitty. He finished off his beer, and leaned around Jack to throw it in the trash.  
   
“Didn’t you say your dad was a coach?”  
   
At that, Bitty let out an even louder, more inelegant snort. “Lord, yes. What a disaster.”  
   
In the dark, Bitty could see the glitter of Jack’s eyes as he turned to look at him. “Yeah?”  
   
Uncomfortable under the sudden scrutiny, Bitty lifted his shoulders. If he hadn’t had those beers, and the tub juice before that, he probably wouldn’t have said anything. But as it was, “Worst son a football coach could ever ask for.”  
   
“I’m sure that’s not true.”  
   
“You’d be wrong,” Bitty said lightly, and let his head thunk onto the back of the bench. “Brrr,” he said, in a painfully transparent attempt to change the subject, “it’s chilly out though.”  
   
Jack, who seemed perfectly fine in a t-shirt and jeans, tilted his head at him, as if noticing for the first time that Bitty wasn’t wearing a coat. “Where’s your coat?”  
   
“Left it in the Haus.” Bitty kicked at the grass, missed, and sent Shitty’s left sandal flying. Jack followed the arc of it with a critical eye.  
   
“Shity has a pair that look very similar to those,” he observed.  
   
“It’s not like I would’ve had better luck borrowing Holster’s,” said Bitty, now sending the other shoe flying. He pouted when he realized, belatedly, that now he was going to have to walk over grass covered in goose poop to retrieve them. He drew his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, resting his chin on top of his knees. “Shoot.”  
   
He pretended not to notice when Jack cast another glance at him, but couldn’t help but startle when Jack let out a very faint sigh and got to his feet. Bitty watched as Jack bent over to retrieve both of Shitty’s sandals, and held them out for Bitty.  
   
“Here.”  
   
“Oh.” Bitty took them. “Thanks, Jack.”  
   
“We should go back inside,” said Jack, still standing in front of him. “Go get your coat.”  
   
At the suggestion, Bitty wrinkled his nose.  
   
Either not noticing or not caring, Jack said, “Come on, Bittle.”  
   
Bitty yawned. “That’s a long way to walk—okay, okay!” he said, flustered, when a pair of large hands came for him. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” He stood, wobbled, and was just inebriated enough not to be able to bat Jack’s hands away when they reached out to steady him.  
   
“How much did you have to drink?”  
   
There was still a hand hovering near his waist somewhere, Bitty was sure of it. “Not that much.”  
   
“Uh huh.”  
   
“I’m serious!”  
   
“You know alcohol hits you harder after C-Form.”  
   
Bitty rolled his eyes. “I’m pretty sure that’s an urban legend.”  
   
“I’ll send you the research.” It shouldn’t have sounded like a threat, and yet.  
   
“Please don’t.”  
   
The party was still going when they got back, though it had mostly migrated to the front yard. To avoid it, Jack and Bitty slipped in through the back door.  
   
“Where did you say you left your jacket?”  
   
“Um.” Bitty gnawed on his lower lip. “I don’t remember.”  
   
Jack stared at him. Bitty flushed. “Seriously, Bittle? Didn’t you say your keys were in there, too?”  
   
“I don’t, uh. Maybe I put it in Shitty’s room? I was up there first.”  
   
With a noise of frustration, Jack placed his hand on the railing and started up. When Bitty didn’t move, Jack turned around, eyebrows arched as if to query, ‘are you coming?’ and Bitty scrambled on up the stairs after him.  
   
As it so happened, Bitty’s jacket was not on Shitty’s bed. Nor was it on Shitty’s chair, nor on his desk, nor draped across his dresser, nor even on his floor. Bitty stood in front of Shitty’s bed, hands wringing, trying not to feel very young and very stupid. “Um,” he started, but Jack held up his hand.  
   
“Come on,” he muttered, and strode through the door leading into the bathroom. Bitty stood stock still, gazing after him in bewilderment, until Jack poked his head back around the doorframe, scowl still in place, and said, “Come _on_ , Bittle.”    
   
After another moment, Bitty followed him.  
   
“Jack,” said Bitty, casting a surreptitious glance around Jack’s room. Aside from an overflowing bookshelf, there wasn’t much to look at, to be honest. The standard, university issue bed was covered in a dark blue and white comforter, and there was a poster of some singer (Bitty had a suspicion that if he knew who, he would be very disappointed) leg planted on a truck, strumming a guitar, and another poster that just said ‘Be Better’ in large block letters.  Bitty moved half of a step closer to the bed, careful not to touch anything. “What—I mean…”  
   
Jack had already plunked himself down into the desk chair and was pulling out his computer. “You can crash in here until the party’s over,” he said over his shoulder. Bitty watched him hover his fingers over a pile of books on his desk. They all had titles like, “Conduit Form Athletes and the Art: 1938-1946,” and “The Quantum and the Human Myth,” and “Energy Arts and the World Wars.” He selected the bottommost one.  
   
“Bittle.”  
   
“What?” said Bitty, tearing his gaze away. “Oh, sorry. Are those for your thesis?”  
   
“Next year, probably, yeah. Bittle, did you even hear wheat I said?”  
   
“Um.” Bitty tried a smile. Jack let out a very deep sigh.  
   
“I said you could crash here until the party’s over and you can find your jacket,” he said now sounding like he was starting to regret offering. “Okay?”  
   
Forgetting that he had told himself not to do so, Bitty sat down on Jack’s bed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, um. Are you sure?”  
   
Jack’s eye roll was nearly audible. “Just lay down, Bittle. And drink some water or something, eh? Christ.”  
   
Ignoring Jack’s latter instructions in favor of the former, Bitty scooted backwards on the bed. Gingerly, just in case Jack somehow decided to change his mind, he lay backwards on top of the comforter. He prodded at the pillow, then gave a mental shrug and rested his head on it.  
   
Though the ruckus of the party was still faintly audible downstairs, Jack’s room fell into silence. The only real noise was Jack’s fingers on the keyboard, and the occasional creak of the bed as Bitty shifted positions.  
   
“Jack?”  
   
_Tap, tap, tap._ “What.”  
   
Bitty picked at the patterns on the comforter. “What made you interested in doing your thesis on the war?”  
   
“I’m not doing it on the war.” Jack resumed typing. “I’m doing it on the development of C-Form as a sport.”  
   
“But they’re kind of related, aren’t they?”  
   
“C-Form existed before the war. It just wasn’t very popular. No one talked about it.”  
   
“But,” Bitty frowned, “why not?”  
   
“I don’t know, Bittle,” Jack huffed. “It just wasn’t.”  
   
“But then,” said Bitty, “why did it suddenly get so popular?”  
   
Jack didn’t even look at him. “Well, when the fae invade through an inter-dimensional rip in space-time or whatever, I guess people will take any weapon they can get. C-Form worked, so it got popular.”  
   
Bitty bit his lip. “Oh. Okay.”  
   
The silence returned, but it somehow didn’t feel quite as comfortable as it had before. From his position prone on Jack’s bed, Bitty watched Jack through half-open eyes. He thought, sleepily, that even if Jack wasn’t very friendly all the time, at least his shoulders were nice to look at.  
   
“Dance Magic used to be part of C-Form,” Jack said unexpectedly. His back was still to Bitty, his voice, neutral. “Did you know that?”  
   
“Oh.” Bitty shook himself awake. “No, I—really?”  
   
“Sure. The principles are the same, eh?”  
   
Bitty chewed on his lower lip in thought. “I guess that makes sense,” he said finally. “Conduit stuff.”  
   
“Yeah, exactly.”  
   
“Is it,” Bitty hesitated, then said, “is it like the art at all?”  
   
Jack was still for a long moment. In fact, Bitty was starting to wonder if he wouldn’t even answer, when Jack said, “It’s kind of, yeah.”  
   
“Huh.” Bitty stole another glance at him. He was still turned away, but his typing, which had slowed, sped up again. “Could you—um. Could you teach me some time? The martial stuff?”  
   
Jack’s shoulders went rigid. “No.”  
   
“It’s okay,” said Bitty hastily, sitting up. Worried he’d overstepped for sure this time, he added, “I was just, um. Curious is all. Just wondering.”  
   
Very slowly, Jack’s shoulders relaxed. “It’s not, uh, personal,” he said, voice quieter than before. “It’s just, I’m not allowed.”  
   
“Not allowed?” Bitty echoed. He cursed himself immediately afterward. Jack probably wanted him to drop the subject, didn’t he? Why did he always have to go and open his big, fat mouth?  
   
“Not allowed,” Jack said firmly, and returned to his books.  
   
Bitty didn’t mean to fall asleep, but despite his grumpiness, the _click, clack, click_ of Jack’s fingers on the keyboard was soothing. Bitty had a brief moment of thinking he should maybe curl up on the floor or something, so at least Jack could have his bed back, but since the next thing he knew, he was waking up to pre-dawn light streaking in through the gaps in the blinds, evidently he hadn’t quit managed.  
   
When Bitty sat up, a blanket fell off his chest, though he seemed to be otherwise technically still on top of the covers.  
   
Weird, thought Bitty, scratching his chest absently. He didn't remember getting up to get a blanket.  
   
He turned to look at the desk where Jack had been sitting, and saw that it was empty. His missing jacket was thrown over the back seat of the chair. Humming in recognition, Bitty swung his feet over to the floor, and stood.  
   
The first thing he did was fold up the mystery blanket in a neat little bundle at the foot of Jack’s bed. Then, he smoothed the sheets and comforter down where he had wrinkled them as he slept. As the final step, he fluffed up the pillow and leaned it against the headboard.  
   
Coat in hand, Bitty visited the bathroom, where he washed his face and tried to get the taste of stale beer out of his mouth with some stolen toothpaste. He didn’t have much of a hangover, for which he could only be grateful, but his stomach was rumbling and he did feel the tiniest bit queasy.  
   
Pancakes, he decided, starting down the stairs. And eggs. Lots and lots of eggs.  
   
The downstairs of the Haus was just about as messy as he’d expected—red solo cups lay crushed underfoot, crumbs littered the floor, and there was a mysterious sticky residue coating the banister and one of the walls that Bitty determinedly ignored. However, there was a decided lack of former party-goers crashed out on the floor, so Bitty spared a moment to thank whoever had kicked them out.  
   
No one else, except of course for Jack, who had vanished to who-knows-where, appeared to even be awake. Bitty had a sense, however, that as soon as things in the kitchen started heating up, he’d probably get some company.  
   
Before he started, Bitty spared a few minutes wiping down the counters, and praying that the dishwasher hadn’t backed up again. Only then did he start opening cupboards, hunting for the flour and the eggs and the butter he’d smuggled into the Haus a few days ago. He had just about finished mixing up the pancake batter (adding slices of half-dead banana and a few, stray, chocolate chips) when the door to the Haus slammed open.  
   
Bitty jumped at the noise, but managed to be a bit more composed when Jack shuffled into the kitchen. His sweaty hair was plastered to his head, he wore black basketball shorts, a Samwell C-Form t-shirt, and a pair of hideous yellow sneakers.  
   
“Oh,” he said. “You’re up.”  
   
“Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Bitty agreed, before his brain could catch up to his mouth and remind him that if he didn’t want people to think he was a hick, he probably shouldn’t use Moomaw’s favorite colloquialisms. With a grimace, he began to spoon batter onto a griddle that looked like it had been purchased second-hand in 1971.  
   
“Uh, okay?” said Jack, watching like a hawk as Bitty zoned in on the eggs.  
   
At one point not so long ago, Bitty might have mistaken that particular look for something harsh. However, he was starting to think that the past few weeks might have given him an altogether different sense of Jack’s moods, so he just said, “Hungry? Eggs’ll be ready in a sec.”  
   
As he spoke, he cracked another few into a bowl, then sprinkled some grated cheddar on them.  
   
Jack lingered in the doorway for another breath and then, unable to resist the call of breakfast, drifted slowly over to the table and sat in one of the rickety wooden chairs. For someone who literally lived there, Bitty thought with a tinge of exasperation, Jack certainly was weird about claiming his space.  
   
Bitty returned to the pancakes in time to flip them, pleased at the golden-brown color on the underside. He turned on the stove, set up a freshly-scrubbed frying pan, and poured in the eggs. “Scrambled, okay?”  
   
“Um,” said Jack. “Yeah. Please.”  
   
Nodding, Bitty armed himself with a spatula. His next words, when they came, were very deliberately casual. “Thanks for letting me crash in your room.”  
   
“It’s uh.” Jack had evidently remembered that this was technically his house, and had gotten up to pour himself a cup of coffee into a chipped Samwell Alumni mug. “No big deal, Bittle. Really.” He sipped.  
   
“I can’t believe you can drink that stuff just straight,” Bitty muttered, making a face. He pulled a couple of plates out of the top cupboard, and piled one high with eggs and half of the pancakes. He slid it in front of Jack, who blinked at him, holding his gaze for a beat longer than necessary. Bitty flushed. “Lord, eat something, would you? You just came back from a run. Oh.” Bitty’s eyes widened, and he reached into the refrigerator. “Sorry, I almost forgot.” He placed the bottle of maple syrup on the table.  
   
Jack, still seeming quite perplexed at the stack of food in front of him, slowly picked up a fork. “Thanks, Bittle.”  
   
Bitty was already busying himself at the griddle with more batter. “It’s really no trouble, Jack,” he said. “I mean, really. I would’ve been making ‘em anyways.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Plus I did kind of steal your bed.”  
   
“I told you it was fine.”  
   
Bitty glanced over, and his jaw unhinged a bit when he realized that Jack had already inhaled half of his pancakes.  
   
“Oh my god, Jack,” he said. “Now, I realize being on this team I’ve had to get used to some inhumanly fast eaters but _I literally just gave those to you_.” He placed his hands on his hips. “Did you not get dinner or something?”  
   
At his words, Jack glanced down at his plate. A light hue of color dusted the top of his cheekbones. “Oh, uh,” he said, swallowing. “These are pretty good, I guess. I don’t like the ones they serve in the dining hall. Too bready.”  
   
“Pretty good,” said Bitty faintly, and flipped a pancake.  
   
Bitty had just moved the last of the second batch onto a plate to cool, and was about to steal a plate of his own before starting on the remainder of the batter, when Shitty stumbled into the kitchen. His hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail, and he was still wearing the previous night’s cut-off jeans and no shirt.  
   
“Coffee!” he bellowed, before sniffing the air, doing a double-take, and focusing in on Bitty. “Oh,” he said, voice suddenly much mellower than before. “Sweet, baby Jesus, Bits.” He collapsed into a chair across the table from Jack. “See, this? This is why you’re my favorite.” He squinted at Jack. “Sorry, Zimmermann. You’ve been displaced.”  
   
“Morning, Shitty.” Bitty waved at him, and moved some of the finished pancakes onto another clean plate. “Eggs, too?”  
   
“You’re a god among men, Bitty.” He reached out to snag one of Jack’s pancakes. Quick as a flash, Jack smacked him on the back of his hand with his fork.  
   
“Get your own, Shits.”  
   
“Sharing is caring, my brother.”  
   
Bitty snorted. “Shitty, these are yours. You don’t have to steal Jack’s.” He handed over Shitty’s plate, also full of eggs, and then sat down at the table next to him, his own meal in hand. “I do appreciate the compliment though.”  
   
“No, Bitty, _you_ ,” Shitty pointed at him, “ _you_ are the compliment. Fuck, these are beautiful. Delicious.” He stabbed his fork into the first pancake and lifted it, whole and dangling, into his mouth. Bitty shook his head.  
   
Shitty chewed, swallowed, took another bite, and added, fork now aimed at Jack and mouth full of food, “I can’t believe you went running this morning, Zimmermann. What the actual fuck is wrong with you?”  
   
“It’s just training.” Jack contemplated his empty plate, then turned to Bitty. “Bittle,” he began.  
   
Bitty waved him towards the pile on the counter. “Help yourself, Mr. Zimmermann.”  
   
“Training,” Shitty scoffed. “What the hell for?” He took a long gulp of coffee. “Hey, Zimmermann, get some more for me, too.”  
   
“You have legs,” Jack said mildly, returning to the table.  
   
“You’re selfish, my man. How many servings have you even had?”  
   
Jack, mouth full of pancake, didn’t answer, but his eyes did crinkle at the corners as he looked at Shitty.  
   
“You’re a bastard,” Shitty informed him.  
   
“There should be enough for all y’all.”  
   
“That’s not the point, Bits.” Despite his words, his own empty plate must have been thoroughly convincing, because he was up not a moment later.  
   
There was a great clattering on the stairs, and then Ransom, followed by Holster, appeared around the doorway.  
   
“Holy shit,” Holster said appreciatively. He was still wearing last night’s oversized shades. “Am I smelling pancakes right now, Rans?”  
   
“Fuck yes.” Ransom was already across to the counter, nose deep into a fresh cup of coffee. But as he lifted his face to scan the kitchen, his smile turned into a frown. “They’re all gone?”  
   
“Wait, what?”  
   
“Bitty!” Ransom said, plaintively. He reached out a hand to stop Holster from smacking into the corner of an open silverware drawer. “What about us?”  
   
“You snooze, you lose, boys.” Shitty winked at them. Bitty hastily got to his feet, but not before punching Shitty lightly on the shoulder.  
   
“There’s more batter,” he said. “Promise.” He eyed Holster. “Uh, Holster, why don’t you sit down when the stove’s on, okay?”  
   
“Don’t be ridic, Bits. I know this Haus like the back of my hand,” Holster declared, just before stubbing his toe on the refrigerator. “Ow.”  
   
“Holtzy, you’re a disaster,” Ransom said. He pulled up a chair. “Sit your ass down.”  
   
Humming to himself, Bitty spooned up the last of the batter, while the others bickered at the table behind him. He finished off the eggs and tossed the carton, got two more plates, and was just turning off the stove when Jack said grumpily,  
   
“The final match set-ups are only in a few more weeks, and then it’s the tournament. I don’t get how I’m the weird one for running. You should all be doing it.”  
   
“Pshaw,” said Shitty. “You’re a machine. We are but men.”  
   
“I’m blind,” Holster added. “Maybe forever.”  
   
“You are _not_ ,” said Bitty. “Holster!”  
   
Holster looked abashed. “Too soon, Bitty?”  
   
Bitty narrowed his eyes at him. “Like I don’t already feel bad enough. Don’t joke about that.”  
   
“We’d have to take you off the team,” said Jack. Bitty wasn’t entirely sure if _he_ was joking.  
   
“Rude.” Holster turned his nose up. “Johnson does just fine.”  
   
“Dude,” said Shitty, eyes gleaming. “I would _love_ to see you try and play goalie.” He spread his hands wide, gripping imaginary posts. “Like a spider in a web.”  
   
Ransom was scraping maple syrup off his plate with his fork. “Where is Johnson?”  
   
There was a momentary pause.  
   
“You know,” said Shitty, lowering his hands, “I haven’t the faintest fucking clue.”  
   
“Maybe he’s running.”  
   
“Sure, Jack.”  
   
“Maybe he ran off,” Bitty said wryly. He settled back into his chair, nursing another cup of coffee.  
   
Jack looked honest to god distressed at the thought. Shitty patted his cheek.  
   
“Don’t worry, man,” he said. He pointed at Holster, who had just dropped his fork on the table for the second time, and was now busy feeling around for it while Ransom watched, lips stretched in a lazy grin. “We’ve got a backup.”  
   
Jack threw him a nasty look, and Bitty couldn’t help but laugh.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one goes out to J and S, who collectively made my day. You know who you are. \\(^_^)/

**Chapter 4**  
   
   
_His hands were cold, his feet already numb. He opened his eyes and saw light through a prism of glass. He reached out his hands and then realized he couldn’t breath—_  
   
“Bittle.”  
   
Gasping, Bitty sat upright in bed. Sweat poured down his back, his heart pounded wildly. He clutched Señor Bun to his chest. “Who—Jack?”  
   
“Bittle,” Jack repeated, from where he stood looming over Bitty’s bed like an incredibly awkward bogeyman. “Come on. We have practice.”  
   
“How did you even get in my room?” Bitty hissed, throwing off his covers anyway. He sent an accusatory glare in the direction of his roommate’s bed, but it was empty.  
   
“Your door was unlocked.”  
   
“That doesn’t mean you can just barge in!” Bitty contemplated yesterday’s track pants, then switched them out for a fresh pair. “My alarm would’ve gone off.” He pulled on a sweatshirt.  
   
“Uh huh.”  
   
Bitty smoothed his hair flat, still scowling as he grabbed his C-Form bag and stuffed his feet into his sneakers “It would have!”  
   
“Sure, Bittle.” Jack held the door open, and Bitty marched through it, nose in the air.  
   
“If I fall asleep in class because of this, you’re getting the blame.”  
   
“Sure, Bittle.”  
   
Their striking practice that day felt strained. Bitty thought that since he had started playing on Jack’s line, he’d developed even more of a sense for his energy, and today felt—not _bad_ , quite, but like his strikes weren’t all the way there. They crackled somehow, like the strength was present but not the intent.  
   
“Jack,” Bitty said, when he needed to do an oddly swooped double-shield to avoid the fizzing energy of Jack’s last strike. “Are you, um. Are you okay?”  
   
Jack looked at him strangely. “Yeah.”  
   
“It’s just, you seem…” Bitty searched. “Distracted?” He frowned. “No, that’s not right.” He glanced up again at Jack, who was shifting foot to foot on the ice, lips pressed together. He let out a breath. “Sorry,” he said. “Maybe it’s just me.”  
   
“Um,” said Jack. He coughed. “No, uh. Maybe we should stop for now.”  
   
“Okay,” Bitty said slowly. Watching Jack shuffle off the ice and then through the sand over to the edge of the rink, he gnawed on his lower lip. “Jack?”  
   
“Hmm?” Jack turned to look at him. He was already sitting on one of the bleachers, easing off his shoes to press fingers into the arch of his foot.  
   
“Are you, um.” Bitty came out of the rink as well. He considered for a moment what he could possibly say, then wet his lips. “I’m kind of. I mean.” He dropped his gaze. “I’m a little nervous about the upcoming match,” he told the floor. “You know, since it’s the start of the tournament.”  
   
“Bittle.” At his name, Bitty looked up. Jack was still focused away from him, now toweling the sweat off his hair. “It’s just a match like all the other ones we’ve had. Just got to keep your head in the game.”  
   
“Well,” Bitty hedged. He twiddled his thumbs. “I mean, it’s normal to be nervous for something like this, isn’t it? Lord knows I always got nervous before competitions, and I still get nervous before every game. I mean, even, uh, guys like you _must_ get nervous sometimes, right? But that’s normal, right?”  
   
Jack let out a soft breath. “Bittle,” he said wryly, “you’re not very subtle, you know?”  
   
“Oh. Well.” Bitty’s cheeks turned a little red. He shuffled where he stood. “Can’t blame a boy for trying.”  
   
“Hmm.”  
   
“…Jack?”  
   
“Yeah?”  
   
“You’re sure you’re okay?”  
   
Getting to his feet, Jack clapped Bitty on the shoulder. “I’m fine,” he said. “Really, Bittle.”  
   
“Bu—okay.”  
   
Jack slung his bag over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Got to get dressed or we’re going to miss breakfast. It’s French toast sticks today.”  
   
Falling into step with him, Bitty commented, “For someone obsessed with nutritional intake, you seem very focused on those sticks.”  
   
“They’re not that bad for you.”  
   
“They’re literally fried dough, Jack. And you dip them in syrup.”  
   
“They’re not fried,” Jack protested.  
   
Bitty rolled his eyes. “Might as well be.”  
   
“They’re baked.”  
   
Bitty blinked. “Jack Zimmermann,” he said, delighted, “did you _look up their nutritional information so you could see how many you could eat_?”  
   
Grumbling, Jack pushed ahead of him.  Too busy cackling to himself, Bitty didn’t even notice.  
   
 

#

   
   
Despite Jack’s reassurances that he was totally fine, not nervous at all about the upcoming tournament, really, Bittle, Bitty decided that there was really no _harm_ in keeping an eye on him. Just in case—well. Bitty didn’t _know_ in case what, but he was supposed to have Jack’s back, wasn’t he? Even if Jack didn’t want him to?  
   
As it so happened, Bitty had also taken to walking to the Haus the long way around campus, conveniently close to a small shop that happened to stock his favorite brand of imported butter. This was where Shitty finally caught him.  
   
“Bitty! My main man!”  
   
“Oh,” said Bitty, turning to see Shitty jogging to catch up with him. Spring now well underway, Shitty had ditched any semblance of winter and wore only a t-shirt and shorts. His heavy bag of books, filled to the brim, swung side to side. “Hi, Shitty. What’s going on?”  
   
“Nada, nada.” Shitty held up his hand for a fistbump. Bitty gave one warily, doing his best not to drop his own bag of newly acquired baking supplies. “Can’t a dude just walk with his dude?”  
   
“Don’t you have class?”  
   
“Eh.” Shitty waved his hand dismissively. “I can do without Keiser’s lecture on the inhumanity of non-human entities, man. Dude’s a grade-A racist fuckwad.”  
   
“I…yes, Shitty. You’ve mentioned.”  
   
“I mean,” said Shitty, “ _Obviously_ a non-human is a non-human but that doesn’t mean they’re not—” his mustache quivered.  
   
“Human?” Bitty suggested.  
   
“See?” Shitty exclaimed. “This is why we need better vocabulary to discuss this shit. Like, it’s retrograde. Like saying ‘mankind’ instead of humanity, but now it’s ‘humanity’ instead of ‘sentient-being’ or whatever the fuck.”  
   
“Yes, okay.”  
   
“But anyway, Bits,” Shitty said, putting a sudden hand on his shoulder, “ignoring the inherently racist paradigm of our human focused world, to which this university does contribute, despite its sad attempts at species diversification—”  
   
“Uh,” said Bitty.  
   
“I mean, Johnson’s my bro, don’t get me wrong, but even _he’s_ mostly human. We are a very human bunch.”  
   
“Well—”  
   
“And I know, I know.” Shitty was shaking his head now. “The border’s only been open for less than ten years, these things take _time_ , blah, blah, blah.” His nostrils flared while Bitty eyed him cautiously. “Keiser’s still a fuckhead though.” He kicked the grass.  
   
“I’m sorry,” Bitty ventured.  
   
“Nah, don’t be sorry, Bits. Just got to fight the fight is all.” Shitty brightened. “Oh, that reminds me—speaking of fighting, what’s with you and Jack?”  
   
Bitty blinked. “Me and Jack?”  
   
“Yeah, man.” Shitty slung an arm over his shoulder. Bitty lurched at the sudden weight, but managed to stay upright. “You’ve been, like, watching him like he’s about to bust powder or something. Anything I should know?”  
   
“We’re not fighting,” Bitty said. He came to a stop just in the middle of the grassy quad. “I’m um, worried about him, I guess. Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so obvious about it.”  
   
“Worried about him?” Shitty’s expression suddenly turned serious. “Why?”  
   
Bitty shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. He’s just seemed stressed, I guess. I thought, maybe with the tournament coming up…” he trailed off. “It’s probably stupid. I guess it’s not even really my business.”  
   
“Nah, brah.” Shitty was fixing him with a sympathetic smile. “I get it. It’s cool.”  
   
“Thanks, Shitty.” Bitty adjusted his backpack and started walking again, shifting his groceries to his other arm. “So, maybe you don’t think I need to be worrying about Jack, I guess?”  
   
Shitty waited a moment before replying. “Jack’s my man,” he said finally. “But I mean, dude’s issues have issues. And they’re like ninety-nine percent C-Form related so. I guess…” he exhaled. “Dude’s probably stressed about the tournament.”  
   
“But he told _me_ not to be.” Bitty frowned.  
   
“Well for you, it’s like any other match, right?”  
   
“I want to win the cup too,” Bitty said indignantly.  
   
“No, I mean.” That time, it was Shitty who stopped first. “Look, the higher level in C-Form the game you get, the closer to C-Form the martial art, you know? That’s why it’s a tournament.”  
   
“Okay…” Bitty said doubtfully. “I still don’t get why that makes a difference though.”  
   
Shitty made an odd noise in the back of his throat. “Man, whatever happened to Jack up in Montreal—you lose your place in a C-Form Gym, it’s gone pretty much forever, right?” He spread his hands. “That’s like old-timey dishonor, man.”  
   
“So…” Bitty said, squinting a little. He sighed, jutting out his lower lip. “I don’t get it.”  
   
Shitty put his finger to the side of his nose. “So…think of it like Jack’s thinking about it.” He made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. “If he wins this, he’s proven himself. He gets his honor back.”  
   
Bitty stared at him. “Shitty,” he said, a horrible realization beginning to dawn on him, “can Jack not go home?”  
   
Luckily, after a moment’s hesitation that Bitty felt lasted for a very terrible couple of centuries, Shitty’s face cracked into the hint of a smile. “Whoa,” he said, shaking his head. “Nah, Bitty. You’re taking me too literally, man. I mean,” he snorted, “it’s old-timey but not _that_ old-timey, you dig?”  
   
“Oh lord,” Bitty said, hand on his heart. “You can’t do that to me, Shitty. I was about to have to call my mother to tell her we needed to adopt Jack Zimmermann.”  
   
At that, Shitty threw his head back in a laugh. “Hell, she could adopt me if she wants.” He grinned at him. “I’d trade her for my dad.”  
   
“She is a firm believer in pants.”  
   
Shitty’s forehead furrowed. “I’m sure we could come to some kind of agreement on that.”  
   
“Fat chance.”  
   
“I’d win her over,” Shitty said.  
   
“Mr. Knight, the chances of you winning my mother over in anything are very slim,” Bitty informed him, “especially if you’re not wearing pants while doing it.”  
   
Shitty sighed. “Anyway,” he said. “Didn’t mean to freak you out there. Jack’s not homeless. His dad’ll probably show up at the tournament even.”  
   
“Then…?”  
   
“It’s an _honor_ thing,” Shitty said again. He waited for a moment, clearly expecting Bitty to finally get it. When Bitty continued to stare at him blankly, Shitty shook his head. “He can go home but he can’t go home to his C-Form Gym,” he said. “He can’t, you know, take his place there. It’s gone. Unless he, you know.” He lifted his hand again.  
   
“Unless he…wins the tournament?” Bitty now felt a bit sick again. “But what if we lose?”  
   
“It’s not that easy, man. Sure, if we win the tournament that’d be sweet and it’d go a long way to proving his worth, but it’s not like the Gym would reopen its spot for him. That ship’s sailed. But…”  
   
“But?”  
   
Shitty tilted his head. “That’s not the only C-Form Gym,” he said.  
   
Bitty’s eyes grew wide in realization. “Oh!” he breathed. “So Jack wants to get scouted?”  
   
They stopped outside the Haus. “Our bro is a legacy,” Shitty said. He smoothed his hand over the wooden porch railing. “Some Gym’s bound to offer him space, they all know he has the skill.” He tilted his head up to stare at the slanted roof. “But don’t you think it’d be sweeter if it was a place that Jack could really be proud of?”  
   
“Jack only wants the best.” Bitty was starting to think he’d gotten it. “So if we win, the best will want him.”  
   
“Exactly.” Shitty patted his cheek, then started up the porch steps.  
   
“Okay.” Bitty bit his lip. “I can see why he’d be nervous.”  
   
“Yeah.”  
   
“But now _I’m_ even more nervous.”  
   
“Can’t help you there, my man.”  
   
Bitty let out a breath. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”  
   
 

#

   
   
When Bitty had been in high school, he’d known that if he ever wanted to get out of Georgia, he was going to have to keep his grades up. Now that he was in college however, without his parents or even the school guidance counselor there to comment on his homework habits, he had been, possibly, a bit _lax_.  
   
“I am _so_ sorry, Professor.” Bitty stood off to the side of the lectern, watching wistfully out of the corner of his eye as the rest of his classmates from SSC 122 filed out of the room. “I know that the response was due today, but—”  
   
“Eric,” Professor Weiss interrupted. He ran his fingers along the ridges of his shaved head. “I realize you’re busy, with the C-Form team going to the tournament this year, but I can’t keep making exceptions for you. This is the third time this semester. It’s not fair to your other classmates.”  
   
Bitty hung his head. “Okay,” he said. “Sorry, sir. I’ll turn the next one in on time.”  
   
He could still feel his professor’s eyes on him. After another moment, the man heaved a sigh. “I want your response online by six pm this evening. After that, I’m closing the response page on the website. Okay?”  
   
Bitty’s head jerked up. “Really?”  
   
Weiss grimaced. “Next time,” he said, shoving a handful of notes into his briefcase, “remember that you’re a student first, athlete second. Got it?”  
   
“Got it!” Bitty nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll go do it right now—before practice so I’ll get it in on time.”  
   
“Marvelous,” Weiss said dryly. He clicked off the projector as Bitty gathered his backpack. “Well, Eric, I guess you’d better give ‘em hell this weekend. Make it worth my while.”  
   
“Definitely.” Bitty slung his bag over his shoulder. “Thanks again, sir!”  
   
And he beat a hasty retreat.  
   
In order to work on his homework assignment, Bitty made the executive decision to skip early dinner. To ensure maximum productivity, he settled in a comer of the team briefing room, where the wifi signal was strongest, and tried to concentrate.   
   
He had just copy-pasted his response into the class website and hit enter to post it, when something crashed down onto the bench beside him. Bitty jumped.  
   
"It's not really a good time to be skipping meals." Jack pointed towards the energy bar now sitting next to Bitty. "You should eat something before practice."  
   
"Oh," said Bitty, his heart restarting. He picked it up, darting a glance at Jack as he did so. "Thanks, Jack. You didn't have to do that." Of course, just at that precise moment, his stomach decided to rumble.  
   
Arms crossed, Jack raised his eyebrows. Bitty flapped a hand at him, cheeks reddening.  
   
"Come on," he said, taking bites of the energy bar anyway. Honestly it kind of tasted like sawdust, but he supposed beggars couldn't be choosers. "When have you ever known me to go hungry? I was—" he took another bite "—going to get something at the dining halls after practice, promise." He pointed at his laptop. "Just had to get in this reading response."  
   
"The dining halls close at eight today."  
   
Bitty frowned. "Oh. Well…"   
   
Jack looked like he was going to say more, but the sounds of the rest of the team coming down the hall silenced him. Instead, he took a seat next to Bitty, who was so surprised he almost didn't move his stuff in time.  
   
"Bitty!" Holster exclaimed. He ruffled Bitty's hair as he passed. Bitty straightened it again with a glower, just in time for Ransom to also swipe his fingers through it as he went to sit over by Holster. "Missed you at chow time!"  
   
"Homework." Nose wrinkling, Bitty pointed at his laptop.  
   
"Oh, right on," said Holster.  
   
Johnson came in last, making an unerring beeline for the seat always reserved for him.  
   
During the briefing, Coach Hall went over several plays planned out for the upcoming tournament. He also spent a fair amount of time on the play that Jack and his line had been practicing for the past several weeks.   
   
"We've got just the right players to pull this off, boys," he told the three of them. "This is the time to use it, all right? The other team’s won't know what hit them." He turned to Bitty, who swallowed. "Bittle, your connection to the Conduit is crucial for this to work, all right? Don't let that go."   
   
Bitty wet his lips. "Got it, Coach."  
   
"And Zimmerman." Coach Hall gave him a stern look. "You've got a powerful hit, but you need to be precise with it. Hit them where their webs are weakest."  
   
"Got it," Jack said quietly. Next to him, Bitty could see the taut clasp of his hands on his thighs.   
   
"Okay, boys!" Coach Hall tapped his clipboard against the whiteboard, and stuck a pencil behind his ear. "Let’s get out there. One more practice, and then I see you all bright and early tomorrow morning to get on that bus!"  
   
"Don't," Lardo added from the back of the room, "be late."  
   
 

#

   
   
The match was tomorrow, and Bitty knew he was supposed to be getting a good night's sleep. However, it seemed the more he thought about sleep, the more he tossed and turned. Finally, in a fit of temper, he lurched out of bed, grabbed his coat and his keys, and headed for the door.  
   
This was how Jack, on a mission for a glass of water, found him in the Haus kitchen an hour later.   
   
Only now, in addition to still being in his pajamas, Bitty’s front half was entirely covered in flour, and his hands were stained purple.  
   
"Jack," Bitty greeted, a manic gleam in his eye. "Hello. How do you feel about blueberries?"  
   
"What," said Jack blankly. He checked his watch to make sure but, yes, it was indeed one in the morning.   
   
"Blueberries, Jack." Bitty was shoving something into the oven now.   
   
"Lots of antioxidants," Jack said automatically. Then he shook himself. "Bittle, what are you doing?"  
   
"Oh, um." Bitty busied himself at the counter with what looked suspiciously like a second piecrust. "I thought I'd make a little something for the road tomorrow, you know..."  
   
"It is one o’clock in the morning."  
   
Bitty slumped. "I know," he told the piecrust. "I just—had a hard time sleeping." He pressed down hard with the rolling pin, before reaching over to the half-empty bag of flour to his right to sprinkle a handful on top.  
   
"Really," Jack bit out.  
   
Bitty's shoulders caved in even more. "Sorry, Jack," he said quietly. "I didn't mean to wake you up. I didn't think about that."  
   
Jack made an inarticulate noise in the back of his throat, and then heaved another deep sigh. "You didn't wake me up." He folded his arms, leaning against the refrigerator. "But you should be _sleeping_ , Bittle."  
   
"You're not."  
   
The corners of Jack’s mouth turned down. "I wanted a glass of water."  
   
Bitty finally looked up from his second set of what Jack could see now were shaping up to be mini pies. One flour-covered hand went to his hip.   
   
“Water?” he said skeptically.  
   
Jack edged towards the cabinet where the glasses were kept. “Water,” he said firmly, absolutely not looking at whatever else was cooling on the counter, nor enjoying the smells coming from the oven.   
   
Bitty pursed his lips. "Well," he said finally, while Jack fumbled for a glass. He jerked his head towards a different cooling rack, eyes darting away, then back to Jack. He looked a bit sheepish. "Want a cookie to go with it?”  
   
"Erm," said Jack. Cookies past midnight were definitely not a part of his diet plan.  
   
"They're maple walnut," Bitty added, and rubbed the back of his neck. He then picked one up off the cooling rack, and extended it to Jack.  
   
And that was how Jack Zimmermann found himself eating cookies and drinking someone's weird herbal orange tea at one fifteen in the morning before the start of the C-Form tournament.  
   
Perhaps another miracle, none of the other Haus residents came down to disturb them. Instead, Jack and Bitty had the whole kitchen and a dozen cookies to themselves. Bitty switched out the first set of mini pies, then slid the next one into oven, before slumping down again into his chair.  
   
Studying his companion across the table, Jack noticed that Bitty's attention was wandering a bit from his cookie, his cheeks flushed.  
   
"Bittle," he said, taking one last sip of cooling tea, "maybe you should try going to bed now?"  
   
"Hmmm?" Bitty rubbed his eyes. "No, I, uh." He jerked his head toward the oven. "I've gotta finish the pies, Jack."  
   
"How long are the pies going to take?"  
   
"Another, um…twenty minutes? Thirty?"  
   
Like a bad dream, Jack could see exactly where this was going. He would never be able to convince Bittle to take a nap on the couch. Jack shut his eyes for a moment to steady himself, then accepted his fate. "How about you go take a nap on my bed," he sighed, "and I'll wake you in, like, twenty minutes or whatever, to get the pies."  
   
At the suggestion, Bittle looked up at him, eyes shining like he'd hung the damn moon or something.  
   
(Must've been the sleep deprivation, Jack thought)  
   
"Really?"  
   
Jack drummed his fingers on the table. "It's fine, Bittle." He pointed at the doorway. "Go."  
   
"Oh-okay." Bitty got to his feet. For a moment, Jack feared that he would need a guide to even find the upstairs. He hesitated just inside the doorway. "Don't forget to wake me when they're done."  
   
"Yeah, yeah." Jack gave him another insistent look. "I've got this, Bittle. Seriously."  
   
He shook his head when Bitty left, feet dragging as he made his way up the creaky stairs.   
   
Of course, Jack had zero intention of actually waking Bitty up at two. Instead, he set his own watch for twenty-five minutes, grabbing his fifth cookie, and settling himself back down at the table. When the watch beeped, Jack checked the oven with a bit of trepidation.   
   
He wasn't quite sure how one was supposed to tell if a pie was done, but he figured if the ones in the oven looked more or less like the ones cooling on the counter, it'd be okay.   
   
They didn't look quite done, the tops still a bit pale, the first time Jack checked. The second time, they were almost too brown, and Jack nearly gave himself a hernia trying to get them out of the oven fast enough.   
   
Jack did not want to know what it would do to Bitty's moral to find out that Jack had burned his pies.  
   
He set them out on the counter next to the first batch, turned off the oven, then stood still in the kitchen for a moment, thinking. Then, clearly coming to a decision, he exited the kitchen on socked feet, grabbed a Samwell throw blanket that Ransom had left downstairs, and made himself comfortable on the green couch that Bitty refused to touch.   
   
It was not quite 2 am.  
   
 

#

   
   
Bitty woke up to weak sunlight streaking through the windows. It took him a moment to remember that _his_ windows, the ones in his dorm room, were actually behind his bed, not across from it. It took another few seconds to remember why this appeared to no longer be the case.   
   
"Shit," he said, jerking upright. Heart pounding, he checked the phone in his pocket.  
   
6:17 AM  
   
Bitty breathed an audible sigh of relief. Though he still felt bad for stealing Jack's bed again (even if it hadn't been entirely his fault, what a liar that boy was!) he at least had time to get himself together before they were scheduled to get on the bus.   
   
The first order of business was to check on the pies. Bitty supposed that since the Haus hadn’t burned down around them in the night, Jack must have done something, even if it was just to turn off the oven, but he wanted to make sure. He nudged open the door, and padded down the hall, stopping briefly in the hallway bathroom to wash his face and pee. The dark circles under his eyes weren’t so bad today. Jack must’ve had a more comfortable mattress than he was used to.  
   
It was a good thing that no one else in the kitchen was around, because when Bitty saw all of his pies neatly laid out and cooling on the counter, he had to stifle a quick intake of breath. Lord, had Jack actually done this? He prodded the nearest one; it was a little bit too brown, but certainly acceptable. The corner of his mouth quirked. Not bad for a beginner.   
   
Though, now that he was thinking about it, where _was_ Jack, anyway? It wasn't like him to skip off and sleep somewhere new the night before an important match, and certainly not before the annual C-Form Tournament.   
   
_Ah_ , Bitty thought, realizing. And indeed, when he went over to the green couch and peered over the top of it, there was Jack Zimmermann, fast asleep, clutching the edge of Ransom’s Samewell throw blanket in one hand, the other flung out to hold onto the ancient, and equally concerning, couch pillow.  
   
For a moment, Bitty just looked at him, absently cataloguing the rise and falls of his breaths, the twitch of his biceps as the sleeves of his shirt rode up. He felt an odd jolt in the base of his stomach.   
   
_Jack Zimmermann,_ he thought, not unkindly as he stared down at their captain. _You are really something_.   
   
Bitty didn’t tarry too long. He still had to pack up the pies and cookies and then get all of his stuff together before making it to the bus in time. He gently stuffed the baked goods into the various plastic containers he’d left stored in the Haus at one point or another, and made sure to close the door quietly when he left.   
   
He also placed a sticky note next to Jack’s hand. All it said was ‘ _Thanks’_ in Bitty’s messy scrawl, but Bitty figured Jack would appreciate the brevity.    
   
Despite his surprisingly eventful morning, Bitty managed to make it to the bus with ten minutes to spare.   
   
Jack wasn’t on it yet. Bitty took a seat in the middle. He watched with an odd sort of trepidation as the rest of the team gradually straggled on, and was a bit concerned to realize, two minutes before they were scheduled to depart, with Lardo near the front frowning at her clipboard and grumbling something under her breath, that Jack was almost _late_.  
   
Bitty need not have feared however. With thirty seconds to spare, Jack finally clambered onto the bus. Though he’d of course been expecting Jack to show up, Bitty did a quick double take at the sight of him.   
   
Whether it was a leftover from his time in more professional C-Form circles or just one of his weird quirks, Jack always made an effort to dress nicely on match days, even if they were just going to the hotel. For Jack, this usually meant slacks and a dress shirt, but it was always at least something that was miles above his usual collection of jeans, t-shirts, and basketball shorts.   
   
Today however, Jack brushed passed the driver’s seat, hair in disarray, looking like he had rolled out of bed possibly ten minutes ago. There was still a red line from the pillow on his cheek. Bitty couldn’t stop staring. Too late, he realized that the spot next to him was the only one not occupied by luggage or a fellow teammate.   
   
“Bittle,” rumbled Jack.   
   
Bitty continued to stare blankly at him. But then, realizing, he quickly swept his backpack off the seat to nestle between his feet. Jack sat down. Up front, Lardo did her final headcount. The bus shuddered to life.   
   
“Did you, um,” Bitty ventured, after a few minutes, the sturdy brick of Samwell retreating into the wooden Victorians and townhouses of the town itself, “did you oversleep?”  
   
Jack frowned but didn't answer. Bitty took that as a yes. To make up for it, he handed Jack the specially packaged pie and cookie combination bag he’d made for him.  
   
“Thanks.” Bitty bit his lip. “For, you know. The pies and stuff.”  
   
Jack eyed the package that Bitty held out to him, like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Then he took it, setting it on his lap. “Not really a big deal,” he said.  
   
Bitty gave him more of a proper frown that time. “You didn’t need to give me your bed,” he pointed out, maybe still a bit cranky about it. “Really, Jack. I would’ve been fine.”  
   
For another long moment, Jack didn’t answer. Bitty almost thought Jack might have been ignoring him. But then Jack said, “I didn’t mind sleeping on the couch. I obviously slept fine, didn’t I?”  
   
“That’s not the point.” Bitty didn’t know why he was suddenly frustrated, but it seemed to boil up in him out of nowhere. _“Jack_.”  
   
Jack turned to him. “I need you on my wing,” he said. “And I need you rested. I mean it, Bittle.”  
   
Bitty gaped at him. Then his shoulders slumped. “You’re impossible,” he grumbled.   
   
“I’m glad I didn’t burn the pie.” Jack was already into the cookies again. Bitty pretended not to notice. He nodded.   
   
“Pretty good for a beginner.”  
   
“Pretty good?” Cookie forgotten, both of Jack’s eyebrows went up. He looked a little affronted.  
   
Bitty nudged him. “For a beginner.”  
   
Jack gave him a long steady look. Bitty returned it evenly.   
   
“Whatever,” Jack said finally. He reached for his headphones.   
   
“I’m serious, Jack.” Bitty put a hand on his forearm. Jack blinked at him. Bitty smiled. “Thanks,” he said again.  
   
Something in Jack’s expression softened. “Got your back, Bittle,” he said. He put his headphones on and leaned back against the seat rest, closing his eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”  
   
“Sure,” Bitty said. _Got your back._  
 


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**  
   
   
Bitty was reasonably sure that nothing could have prepared him for this moment. Even the hours, days, months of C-Form matches, was nothing compared to the roar of _this_ crowd, the vastness of _this_ C-Form rink, the pressure of _this_ match.  
   
“I’m going to faint,” he decided, and clutched the railing beside him. “And then vomit.”  
   
“Bro,” said Ransom, in solidarity. He patted Bitty on the back. This did nothing for the dizziness and nausea sweeping from Bitty’s head to his toes.  
   
Bitty checked out the rink again, then wished he hadn’t. The ice somehow looked even colder. The sand hotter. The water…wetter? Bitty turned away. “Is this rink bigger than they’re supposed to be?”  
   
“Boston Center Rink is standard-sized.” Now it was Jack clamping a hand down on Bitty’s shoulders. Bitty’s knees almost buckled. Perversely, Jack didn’t even look worried at all. He just looked very, very focused.  
   
But that was pretty normal.  
   
“Oh,” Bitty said faintly, and was half-surprised to find that his vocal cords even worked. He was even more surprised to find Jack’s hand at his back now. Then, he realized it was because Jack was propelling him forward. “Jack?” he hissed.  
   
“We’re on, Bittle,” Jack murmured back. “If you throw up, try to wait until the end of the match to do it, okay?”  
   
Bitty huffed. “You’re unbelievable.”  
   
And then they were on.  
   
Bitty was entirely convinced that there was no way he was going to survive this.  
   
Were they absolutely sure they’d played this team before? The heat of the energy around them crackled at the air. Bitty’s hair stood up on end. In the goal, Johnson crouched motionless, eyes closed, looking more like he was meditating than trying to keep five other individuals tuned into a Conduit web on one side, a bunch of goons trying to break his threads on the other.  
   
A thread snapped and electricity fizzled, sending up a shower of sparks. Johnson flinched. The point was awarded to the other team. Bitty slid to the ground, hands firmly in contact with the ice. He slapped it twice, sending a wave through the Conduit towards Jack’s foot, bypassing the notice of the defenders surrounding him. It didn’t bypass Jack though. Jack stomped once, hard, compounding it, then with a spin and a kick, sent the now-doubled wave of energy straight through one of the defenders’ legs to smash into a net of vines.  
   
The thread snapped, going up in a blaze of fire and smoke. Jack got the point that time.  
   
Bitty was allowed to rest for a few minutes. Shitty took his place. He gulped water, wiping his chin, stealing glances over at Jack, who sat on the bench next to him. One of Jack’s legs jiggled, but the rest of him was perfectly still. Except for his eyes. They zigzagged back and forth across the rink, watching the bright shots of energy, darting focus from person to person, back into the ground, then out again.  
   
Bitty looked over just in time to see Holster take what looked like a direct shot to the chest. He winced. The only thing that kept him from a total panic was the sight of one of Ransom’s hands clutching Holster’s, the other splayed out on the sand below them, and a glow around his fingers as Ransom redirected the energy back into the Conduit, away from Holster’s heart. Bitty turned to Jack, incensed.  
   
“That’s a total foul! Holster could’ve been really hurt!”  
   
The rest of the team, and Jack, seemed to agree with him, if the shouts and the shoves coming from the rink were any indication. Jack was already on his feet, trying to argue with the referees, but they weren’t having it. He finally sat back down again, permanent line notched between his brows, lips pressed thin.  
   
“Bunch of assholes,” Bitty fumed. Jack dipped his head in agreement, narrowed eyes still on the match. Holster seemed none the worse for wear though. He was patting Ransom, who was still looking considerably furious, on the arm, then squaring up again in preparation for the whistle to restart the play.  
   
The match continued. Tied 2 to 2 and with less than ten minutes left, Coach Hall directed Jack’s line to return to the rink. Adrenaline fizzing through his limbs, Bitty clambered gracelessly off the bench to follow the ramrod straightness of Jack’s back, shoulders tense beneath his uniform.  
   
It seemed as if the match had only ratcheted in intensity since they’d been in the rink last. Bitty could feel the crackle of energy lift the hairs on the back of his neck. In the center, he dug his feet into the ice, felt the click of the metal studs at the base of his shoes crack into the solid surface. He glanced over at Jack, who had taken his stance, one back foot planted firmly on the ice below him, the other only lightly touching and bent at the knee, ready to direct the energy with it if his hands failed him. His mouth was steady, his eyes hooded, but he met Bitty’s gaze.  
   
“Bittle,” he said, and made the smallest gesture towards Bitty’s hands.  
   
And just like that, Bitty knew what Jack wanted. He cast a quick glance over at the opposing team, especially the guy who’d made the illegal hit on Holster. Trepidation churned in his gut. He licked his lips.  
   
“Bittle,” Jack said again, voice firm, a touchstone. Bitty took a deep breath. He settled into his own stance, weight even on both feet, both knees bent as he faced forward.  
   
“Okay, Jack,” he said. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded quiet. “Got it.”  
   
The whistle sounded.  
   
Jack exploded off the ice with one leg, kicking out the other a spray of mixed energy and ice chips. It was his signature move, meant to disperse and distract the field across from him. Under cover of it, Bitty slipped into the shadow of his energy stream. He slid along the ice behind Jack, one hand trailing along the slick surface, then dipping into the water, then clutching fistfuls of the sand as they made their way across to the other side.  
   
Every other breath, Jack would kick up another spray. He didn’t just use the same foot either, switching side to side, foot to foot to hand and back, keeping their opponents guessing. That sort of movement took a lot of energy, so Bitty doubled down on his connection to the Conduit. He fed it to Jack, who continued to pummel at the other team’s net, weakening their connective strands with every blow.  
   
The defenders on the other team were on to them now. On Jack’s other side, the third member of their line, Einhardt, was busy tossing up shield after desperate shield, timing them opposite Jack’s hits, trying to stop the other team from striking him. They were starting to surround Jack, barely giving him time to breathe between strikes.  
   
Too distracted with Jack’s showing, they still hadn’t noticed what Bitty was doing. But even with his help, Bitty could see that Jack was tiring. His shots were now a few seconds off from the pattern, in turn throwing Einhardt and his shields off.  
   
One of the shields was so mistimed, it let a beam of red through. Bitty slammed his whole fist into the water, teeth grinding, and intercepted it with his own wall of yellow.  
   
More energy, he thought, Jack needed _more energy_. He was almost through the other side’s defenses! He just needed…  
   
Bitty dug both feet into the sand below. Not his favorite Conduit, but he was just going to have to deal. His two hands he pressed into the water. The fluidity of the water more than made up for the stubbornness of the sand. It was almost too much: sinuous and subtle, water was the most seductive of the elements, the easiest to conduct.  
   
It was also the most dangerous.  
   
Bitty gasped as he reached out for the energy he knew was waiting for him. He felt it tingle up his legs, burn through his arms. He was surrounded by it. The water was cool but the energy was hot as fire, the sand ignited beneath his feet. He wasn’t just conducting, he _was_ the conductor. He couldn’t see Jack anymore, but he could feel him there. Flickering, weak.  
   
 _His feet_ , Bitty thought. He twitched his toes, still buried in the sand, forward, nudged everything towards where he could still feel the stutter-flame of _JackJackJack._  
   
Like a tidal wave beneath their feet, the sand shuddered. Grains rolled and crashed together. Bitty squeezed unseeing eyes shut, took a deep breath, and shot his consciousness towards the water, towards the sand, towards Jack.  
   
He felt it make contact. He felt Jack suddenly blaze brighter. He felt all around him as the opposing team’s energy web came suddenly undone, bright, crisscrossing lines winking out into darkness.  
   
And he felt himself, falling, falling, falling.  
   
He heard a voice. He felt a hand, an arm, a touch to his forehead, but with the last of his fading consciousness, Bitty knew: he’d accidentally gone too deep.  
   
And there was no one within a hundred miles who could pull him back out again.  
   
   
#  
   
   
Scratchy. That was the first thing Bitty thought. He lifted his hand to rub at his wrists, wondering when his sheets had dropped several thousand thread counts, and then realized he couldn’t.  
   
That’s when the panic started.  
   
He tried to jerk himself upward, but he was being held tight by—something. Bitty heaved in a breath, choked, opened his eyes, but the scene in front of him made no sense. He was no longer in the C-Form rink. There were screens and wires and a shrieking noise somewhere behind him and his arms _hurt_ and so did his feet and—  
   
Bitty passed out again.  
   
   
#  
   
   
“Bittle.”  
   
Damn. That was Jack’s voice. Bitty was probably late for early morning practice again. He must’ve overslept.  
   
“Bittle.”  
   
There was a hand on his cheek. It felt cool. Bitty opened his eyes.  
   
“Ah,” Shitty said. His beaming face swam into focus. Still entirely befuddled, Bitty watched as Shitty smacked Jack across the shoulder blades. “See, man?” he said. “Totally right. Your naturally commanding voice wakes even the dead.”  
   
“That’s not funny,” Jack said. His face was very pale. His dark hair flopped over his forehead. “Bittle,” he repeated, then looked guilty. “Eric.”  
   
“Yeah?” Lord, but his throat hurt. What in the hell had even happened? Where was he? He slurred, “Jack? What’s goin’ on?”  
   
“Dude,” Shitty said. He also looked tired, but he smiled down at Bitty. “You fuckin’ singlehandedly blinded all those dicks at BU, man. That’s what happened. Sweet fucking move.”  
   
“Shitty,” Jack snapped, as Bitty stared disbelievingly at him.  
   
“I did what?”  
   
Now it was Shitty’s turn to also look guilty, and not a little cagey. “Also you…might’ve gone too deep into the Conduit. Like, lethal-deep.” He exchanged glances with Jack, then added, “And Jack might’ve had to pull you out. Possibly.”  
   
Bitty lurched upright. He _was_ attached to some wires, but they pulled along easily enough. “I did _what_?” he demanded. His voice was hoarse, like he’d been shouting. But he didn’t remember shouting. Then again, he clearly didn’t remember much.  
   
“Jesus, Shits.” That was Lardo’s voice behind them. Bitty hadn’t even noticed her sitting in the chair in his—was this a hospital room? Good lord. Both her legs had been drawn up to her chest, but she straightened them now, getting to her feet. She wasn't wearing her Samwell C-Form uniform jacket anymore. It looked like she had instead stolen someone’s sweatshirt. “Way to break it gently.”  
   
“Oh my god,” Bitty said, eyes wide. His breaths were starting to come quicker now. “I can’t believe this.” He turned to Jack. “What—”  
   
“Bittle.” Jack made an aborted hand gesture towards Bitty’s bed, then stuck his hand back into his pocket. “They said you were going to be fine. Once you,” he hesitated. “Once you woke up.”  
   
“Oh my god,” Bitty repeated. Lardo settled onto the bed beside him. She rubbed his back. He looked at her, swallowing. “Did you tell my mother? She is going to _kill me_.”  
   
“Coach called your parents,” Jack said quietly. He wouldn’t quite look Bitty in the eye. “By that time we knew you were—probably going to be okay. But I think your mom might be coming up anyway.”  
   
Bitty covered his face with his hands. “Oh lord,” he moaned. “This is so embarrassing. I am so, so sorry.”  
   
“Nah, don’t be, Bits.” Shitty gave his shoulder a squeeze. “You didn’t do it on purpose. Plus we _did_ win that one.”  
   
“Yeah?” Bitty searched Jack’s face. Jack swallowed. Bitty watched the bob of his throat.  
   
“Got eliminated the next round though.” Lardo’s voice cut through the silence. “Too bad.”  
   
“There’s always next year.” Bitty supposed Shitty was trying to be upbeat, but all Bitty could see was Jack still not looking at him.  
   
“Next year,” Bitty echoed, dazed. Christ. It was rare enough that a Dancer went too deep into the Conduit. A C-Former was almost unheard of. And Jack had been the one to rescue him? That was…  
   
Overwhelmed, Bitty shut his eyes.  
   
Jack was wringing his hands now, fiddling with the call button attached to Bitty’s bed.  
   
“Hey,” said Lardo. She dropped her hand away from Bitty, patted the lump where his knee pressed up underneath the thin, hospital-issue blanket. “We should really tell someone you’re up.”  
   
“Oh,” said Bitty. He opened his eyes again, gnawing on his lower lip. “I mean. If you think so.”  
   
“Bittle.” Jack again. That low growl in his throat probably wasn’t a good sign, was it? Bitty shrunk back against the pillow. Now that Jack _was_ looking directly at Bitty, Bitty kind of wished he wasn’t again. His gaze was almost too much to bear. “They need to know you’re awake.”  
   
Ignoring the sudden lump in his throat, Bitty nodded. He looked down at his lap, tried to smile. “Guess you should probably go then,” he said. He was mostly sure the tremor in his voice was unnoticeable. “Let ‘em get a head start on all their poking and prodding.”  
   
Shitty grimaced at him. “Bro,” he said, holding his hand up for a fistbump, “may they prod you gently.”  
   
“Shitty,” Jack sighed, while Lardo just pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. She gave Bitty one more pat on the back, then climbed off his bed, tugging Shitty by the sleeve through the door and out of the room.  
   
Jack actually hesitated a moment. Then he said, voice gruff and with an odd crack in it, “Good to see you awake, Bittle.”  
   
Bitty swallowed. He wasn’t going to trust his voice right then, so he just nodded. Jack seemed to get the message though. His gaze lingered for a moment on Bitty’s bandaged arms, the pallor of his face, and then he, too, turned and left the room.  
   
It felt, suddenly, very quiet.  
   
But Bitty didn’t have enough time to wonder if he shouldn't have requested that one of them stay with him. Almost as soon as he’d eased himself back down to a supine position, a doctor and a nurse came bustling inside.  
   
“It’s rare we have this sort of sports injury,” the nurse told him. He was fitting a selection of electrodes all around Bitty’s head, presumably to make sure he hadn’t fried his brain too badly. “Usually if it’s Conduit related, it’s burns or,” he grimaced, tugging his own blond hair, “blindness.”  
   
“I have those.” Bitty showed the nurse his arm, resolutely not feeling guilty about what he might’ve accidentally done to the vision of the entire BU C-Form team. It wasn’t like he’d tried to do it on _purpose_ anyway.  
   
The arm had been bandaged of course, but he could still feel the itch of the now-healing skin. The actual mechanics of his flesh being burned while technically underwater escaped him, but he wasn’t going to argue with the pain. He also didn’t want to know what his arms would’ve looked like if they hadn’t been conducting an element like water.  
   
He was a little afraid to look at his legs.  
   
“Yes, we noticed.” The doctor came up to him, flipping something on her chart. She peered into his eyes with a tiny flashlight, while Bitty tried not to blink. “Headache?”  
   
“N—no.”  
   
“Good, good. Any other aches?” She was feeling the skin around his wrist.  
   
“No, just. Um. My burns itch, I guess.”  
   
“Tired?”  
   
She’d hit the nail on the head with that one. Bitty nodded. He felt like his limbs were full of metal.  
   
She grimaced. “That’s to be expected with that much energy running through you at once. You’ll probably be feeling it for the next couple of months, at the very least.”  
   
“Next couple of months?” Bitty exclaimed. “What?”  
   
“At least.” She flicked off the flashlight, and looked at him sternly over a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. “You’re going to have to lay off the energy conducting for a while. You’re lucky you don’t seem to have any permanent damage.”  
   
“Months,” Bitty repeated again, dazed. He slumped back against the pillow. The nurse patted his arm, chubby hands oddly comforting, then stuck a needle into the inside of his elbow. Bitty was too distracted to even jump at the pinch to his skin.  
   
“I’m sure your coaches will have a word with you about it,” the doctor told him.  
   
The lump in his throat was back again, so Bitty didn’t feel like he could do much more than nod.  
   
After they’d finished their battery of tests, Bitty assumed that they would leave him to his angst. They did, but were quickly replaced by Coaches Hall and Murray.  
   
He just wanted to go back to sleep!  
   
The coaches’ concern was understandable. Bitty supposed that he’d broken some kind of team record here, getting suckered into a Conduit enough to risk brain or heart damage.  
   
Bitty frowned. C-Formers used the Conduit, they didn’t become it. _Bitty_ only knew how to do it _because_ he’d done the Dance.  
   
That did beg the question though: how in the hell had Jack, of all people, been able to pull him out?  
   
“…So you understand, Eric.”  
   
Bitty blinked slowly at them. “I’m sorry,” he said belatedly. “I must’ve lost track.”  
   
Hall sighed. The concerned wrinkle between Murray’s eyebrows deepened. He placed his hand on Bitty’s shoulder and squeezed. Why did people keep doing that?  
   
“While we do appreciate your, uh, commitment to the game,” Murray said, now unable to hide the worry-lines pulling around his mouth, “we would really prefer if you’d avoid doing this again in the future. Since the doctors don’t seem to know if you’ll have any long-term effects, we’ll see if you’re fit to play at the beginning of next year’s preseason. But until then, you need to rest. Got it?”  
   
“No more throwing yourself into the Conduit.” That was Hall. “Even to win. This isn’t the Middle Ages. We don’t need any suicide sacrifices.”  
   
Bitty paled. “Definitely not.”  
   
The coaches looked like they wanted to say more on the subject, probably to do with rest and recuperation and _not being an idiot_ , but they were interrupted by a low cry at the door.  
   
 _“Dicky!”_  
   
Bitty went vermillion. “Mother,” he protested, as Suzanne shoved aside a several-thousand dollar piece of monitoring equipment and squeezed herself in between two NCAA coaches to reach his bedside. She looked like she was a hair’s breath away from engulfing him in a crushing embrace, but checked herself when she took in the sight of him.  
   
She took in a deep shuddering breath. “Eric Richard Bittle,” she said. “I cannot _believe you_.”  
   
As she spoke, Hall and Murray exchanged glances, and then as one began to sidle towards the door.  
   
 _Cowards_ , thought Bitty, trying to look attentive and not sulky as his mother, now assured that he was mostly still alive, began to berate him.  
   
“Dropping all the way into the Conduit? No safeguards? Wasn’t that the first thing Katya taught you? _The very first thing?_ What were you _thinking_?”  
   
“I didn’t mean to, Mama,” he tried, but she silenced him with a glare.  
   
“Just about gave us all a heart attack, Dicky.” She exhaled and finally sat down on the side of his bed. “I need to call your father. He hasn’t slept in two days.” Despite her fearsome expression, she ran gentle fingers through his filthy hair. “You foolish boy.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “Never do that again.”  
   
“Sorry,” Bitty said again, meekly.  
   
“I’ll bet you are,” she sighed. She resettled herself, crossing one leg on top of another. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to a doctor yet, but that sweet girl—Larissa? She said there’s no heart damage. Or brain damage. Thank god.”  
   
“That’s what they said.” Bitty wondered just how much his mother would notice if he tried to close his eyes a bit. He decided to risk it anyway.  
   
She did notice, of course, but didn’t say anything, just continued to pet his hair. Bitty thought it felt rather nice, like when he’d been little and sick with the flu.  
   
“Sleep, honey,” she said. “It’s all going to work out just fine.”  
   
   
#  
   
   
It was Tuesday. Jack was back in his room again.  
   
“I guess you must think me all sorts of stupid for going all in like that.” Bitty kept his eyes on his lap as he spoke. There was a tray of sad meatloaf and jello at his elbow, but Bitty hadn’t felt much like eating it, even before Jack showed up. “Sorry about the last match.”  
   
“It’s okay.” Jack’s voice was quiet.  
   
Bittle wasn’t sure what kinds of feelings he ought to have been reading out of Jack’s voice, if indeed he ought to have been reading any at all. He said, the words cracking a little as they made their way past his uncooperative throat. “I wanted us—I wanted to win. But I didn’t mean—” he broke off, lowered his volume to a whisper. “I didn’t mean to do _that_ , Jack. Promise.”  
   
“I know.”  
   
Jack’s back was to the window. With the angle of the light coming through, it was impossible to see what expression he wore. Bitty said, more urgently this time, “I am so, so sorry, Jack. I didn’t—I mean, I don’t know how you even—it was such a risk for you to even—”  
   
“Bittle.” There was something tired about the way Jack said it. Not like he was tired of Bitty, exactly, but—something. There was this weariness about him, but it draped over Jack so well that it seemed less like something new, and more like it was just a facet of Jack that Bitty had never bothered to notice before. Or maybe, and more likely, Jack had never allowed him to see it before.  
   
“Sorry,” Bitty said again.  
   
Jack sighed. “You don’t have to keep apologizing. I know what it’s like.”  
   
“Uh.” Bitty frowned. “You…know what it’s—what?”  
   
Jack’s swallow was audible. “Look,” he said, drawing away from the window, closer to Bitty’s bedside, “I knew how to pull you out, because…” he paused, glanced at the open doorway, then said very quietly, “I once did the same thing.”  
   
Though there was only the two of them, Bitty didn’t think he’d ever _felt_ a room go so quiet so quickly. It was like a blanket had been laid over the inches between them. He turned the words over in his head.  
   
 _I know what it’s like_.  
   
“You…” said Bitty slowly, then made himself stop. “How?” he said instead.  
   
In the chair, Jack’s shoulders hunched. “I, um.” He cleared his throat. “How much do you know about m—my family?”  
   
Bitty flushed. There maybe had been a few furtive Google searches involved on that front, when he’d first joined the team and been introduced to its illustrious captain. But all he said was, “Not much. Just that you’ve—they’ve—got a, um, a Gym?” he stumbled over the word. “A real C-Form one, that is.”  
   
“Yeah,” Jack murmured. Bitty recognized that murmur. It was the sound Jack made when they’d just gotten back from losing a match, and Bitty had offered him a slice of whatever he’d made that night, just to see if he could get Jack’s lips to quirk. Bitty knew what it meant.  
   
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, Jack. I’m not entitled to an explanation just because you…” _saved my life_ , went unsaid, but the words hung in the air regardless. Bitty couldn’t help but marvel at the question surrounding them. Jack. _Jack_ had gone after him into the Conduit. Jack had done that. For _him_.  
   
Something occurred to Bitty.  
   
“You could’ve died.”  
   
Predictably, Jack shrugged.  
   
But now that the thought had awoken in him, Bitty couldn't make himself let go of it. “Jack, you could’ve died,” he repeated, insistent. “You could’ve—for a _game_. Because I was too stupid to—”  
   
“Bittle.”  
   
Bitty shut up. “Sorry.”  
   
There was another long, tension-filled moment.  
   
Jack sighed. Bitty wondered if this was the part where Jack got up, clasped his shoulder, said something cliché and pithy, and then left the room, after which they never spoke about it again. Like men.  
   
But Jack did none of those things. Instead, he let out another breath, longer than the first, and scooted a chair closer to Bitty’s bedside. He sat in it. Bitty watched him, the way one might watch a collarless dog of unknown origin.  
   
“Have you ever been to a C-Form Gym? A real one?”  
   
That one was easy. “No.”  
   
Jack didn’t seem bothered. “It’s not like the game,” he said. “It’s more—it’s a lifestyle, I guess. Um, there’s a word for it. Like—discipline.”  
   
“Discipline,” Bitty repeated.  
   
Jack made a face. “But not like punishment. Just like. Strict.”  
   
“Okay…”  
   
Jack waved his hand. “The point I’m trying to make,” he said, still frowning, “is I guess—I grew up with it. It was everything, you know? When my dad…” he trailed off, eyes temporarily far away, like he wasn’t even looking at Bitty at all. “Traditional,” he said. His shoulders hunched. “I was supposed to be like him.” He shook his head. “I wanted _so much_ to be like him. As good as him, you know?”  
   
That, at least, Bitty could relate to. “I know what that’s like,” he said. Jack blinked at him, a rare smile curling at the corners of his mouth.  
   
“Yeah, you told me about the football thing.”  
   
Bitty shuddered.  
   
“I guess…” Jack raked his fingers through his hair. “Anyway, I was doing Conduit all the time. Like, every day, every night. I didn’t do anything else. But I guess, I mean. I didn’t think it was enough. I don’t know. There was competition, and I…I was just a kid, you know? Kids are stupid.”  
   
“Kids are stupid,” Bitty agreed. He tried to imagine a teenaged Jack, hour after hour in the rink. Unsettlingly, it wasn't that difficult. “What happened?”  
   
“You know alcohol magnifies C-Form?”  
   
Bitty scoffed. “That’s an urban legend.”  
   
“No, it’s not.” Jack caught his gaze. “I uh, I started using it to magnify the effects. It wasn’t—wasn’t _technically_ cheating, you can’t cheat at a martial art, right? It’s not a game. But it was,” he blew air out of the corner of his mouth. “It was against the spirit of things,” he said finally. “Not the kind of Gym my dad would’ve wanted to lead.”  
   
“So he…caught you?” Bitty guessed. But Jack shook his head.  
   
“I got really good at hiding it,” he said. “And I was always trying to think of other ways I could maybe, _feel_ the Conduit better, you know?”  
   
And then Bitty understood. “Dance,” he said. His eyes widened. “Jack, you _didn’t_.”  
   
Jack dipped his head. “Without a teacher. Without any—” he snorted. “No safeguards. I found a freaking _book_ on it, Bittle. In the _library_.”  
   
Bitty’s hands had crept to his mouth. “Jack,” he whispered. “That was so, so dangerous. I can’t believe—” he made himself stop. Closed his eyes. Obviously, Jack knew it had been dangerous. _Obviously_. “My mother would’ve murdered me if I’d pulled something like that,” he said instead.  
   
“Mine came close,” Jack said, rueful. “Not that I blame her.”  
   
Bitty couldn’t help himself. “So, what happened?”  
   
Jack had been looking at his hands as he spoke, but now he lifted his gaze. His eyes caught and held Bitty’s. “One night,” he said. “I got really upset because another—another student, um.” His voice stumbled on the word _student_ like he’d maybe meant to say something else, and had just substituted the first thing that came to mind. Bitty wondered if there was a story behind it, but he wasn’t about to ask.  
   
“He’d done much—better, I guess, that day. In something or other.” Jack let out a snort. “You know,” he said, looking surprised, “I can’t even remember what he’d even done better at that day.” He shook his head. “Whatever,” he said. “Point is, I was pissed off because I was thinking—god, Bittle, I was _so dumb_ —oh, I’ll never be good enough, my dad’s gonna, he’s gonna pick Kent over me to inherit the Gym, I’ll never…” he trailed off, cleared his throat. “I got really drunk.”  
   
Bitty couldn’t hold back a noise of disbelief. Jack scowled at him. “I’m sorry,” Bitty said. “I just have a heard time imagining you drunk is all. You barely ever drink.”  
   
“Yeah, well.” Jack rubbed at his temples, “There’s a reason for that.” He tilted his head back, like maybe the grooves on the ceiling would give him strength, then looked at Bitty again. His voice was quiet, as matter-of-fact of a confession as they came. “I got really drunk and I went out into the middle of the C-Form rink. I sat down on the ice and I thought to myself, ‘if I could do this, mix the martial aspect with the emotional—the Dance—my dad would have to pick me. He’d have to.’”  
   
“Oh, Jack,” Bitty whispered.  
   
“Anyway, K—that other student. He was the one that found me, a couple of hours later. Drunk off my ass, stuck in the Conduit.” Jack shook his head. “They had to call in some kind of specialist to bring me out again. And even then, I was in the hospital for—Jesus, I can’t even remember.”  
   
“But after that you were…okay?”  
   
Jack let out a short, “Ha.” He shook his head. “Not even close.” He was looking far away again. “But after all the medical stuff and the counseling and all that.” He grimaced. “I knew I couldn’t stay, you know? It wasn’t the same.” His voice grew quieter. “People looked at me different.”  
   
Something inside Bitty ached, and it wasn’t from the burns on his arms. “Must’ve been hard.”  
   
Jack didn’t meet his gaze, but he did nod. “I guess,” he said. “Anyway, I didn’t want to give it all up so much as…fix it?” He gestured. “So I came here.”  
   
Bitty made a wry sound in his throat. “Sorry if I messed that one up for you.”  
   
Jack glanced at him sharply. “You’ve been a great player, Bittle,” he said, sounding again like Jack the C-Form team captain. “Don’t sell yourself short.”  
   
But Bitty just hummed.  
   
“Anyway.” Jack was getting to his feet now. “That why I knew how to. Um. So, there you go.” He looked at his watch. “I was only supposed to be in here while your mom was getting coffee.” He seemed concerned. “That’s a long time to get coffee.”  
   
Bitty rolled his eyes. “She’s probably made best friends with the barista and been invited to a baby shower or something.”  
   
“Ah.” For some reason, that seemed to amuse Jack. He lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a family trait?”  
   
Bitty crossed his arms. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  
   
“Uh huh.” Jack was gathering up his coat now. He was smiling.  
   
Watching him, Bitty hesitated. Their conversation from before seemed to be over, and he wasn’t sure if he really wanted to bring it back up again. But on the other hand…  
   
“Jack, wait. I um. I want you to know.” Bitty folded the blanket in between his fingers. He darted a glance up at Jack’s face. “I appreciate what you told me. You know I won’t ever tell another soul.”  
   
Jack’s mouth twisted. “That’s okay, Bittle.” He shrugged, but he did seem a little pleased at Bitty’s promise of discretion. “Can I be—I mean.” He moistened his lips. “I probably should tell more people about it anyway. Secret, uh, _shames_ just kind of make everything worse, eh?”  
   
Bitty pursed his lips. He caught Jack’s wrist. “Don’t ever feel like you have to,” he said seriously. Without intending to, his grip tightened. “I mean it, Jack.”  
   
Jack’s expression did something complicated, but then he just said, “Okay, Bittle. Thanks.”  
   
Bitty released him. He smoothed the wrinkled blanket out over his lap. “I’m serious, Jack. You don’t need to thank me for anything.” He hesitated. “But if you don’t mind my asking…”  
   
“Yeah?”  
   
“Why did you tell me? You know you didn’t have to. No one would’ve said anything.”  
   
Jack was quiet for a moment. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose,” he said finally. “Go too deep into the Conduit, I mean.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, peering out at Bitty from beneath his bangs. “But I guess. Even if you had. I wanted you to know that I wasn’t—I’m not—” He blew out a gust of frustrated air. “I know I come off as angry a lot of the time. But I thought you should, like, know I’m not—yeah, I’m a little disappointed we lost, but Bittle, _you could’ve died_.” His jaw was tight now. He _did_ look angry.  
   
“Oh.” Bitty swallowed.  
   
Jack took what was obviously supposed to be a calming breath. “I know better than most that people make stupid mistakes sometimes. So I guess I…” His shoulders slumped. “I’m mad that it happened, but I’m not mad at you, you know?” He gave Bitty a look. “I know you would’ve thought I was, so…”  
   
There was something hot prickling at the corners of Bitty’s eyes. “Oh,” he said again, softly. He looked down at his lap, worrying the blanket some more. He knew Jack was right, and that bothered him for some reason. He tried on a smile. “I’m glad you’re not mad at me then, Jack.”  
   
If anything, Jack seemed relieved at his response. “Gotta have your back, right?”  
   
Bitty exhaled. “Right.”  
   
   
 


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**  
   
   
The room was full to bursting with flowers. Pink and orange roses, white chrysanthemums, purple irises. Bitty didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do with them. He did appreciate the thought, really, they were all lovely, even the cheapest of the daisies, but there was just no way he was going to be able to take them all back with him.  
   
“Dude,” said Holster, who’d come up with his van for the sole purpose of driving Bitty’s ass home from Boston Memorial, “all this shit is not going to fit. Van’s big but not that big.”  
   
“I know,” Bitty despaired. “They’re all so nice though!”  
   
“Yo, Bitty, why don’t you just donate them?” Ransom stuck his head around the corner.  
   
“Donate?”  
   
“Like, to the other people on the floor, man.”  
   
“Oh.” Bitty brightened. “Good idea!”  
   
In the end, they had to enlist a couple of nurses, who were more than happy to pass out the flowers to the remaining patients. Bitty limited himself to one bouquet of irises, one spring mixture with daisies and baby’s breath, and a third made out of, not flowers, but lollipops.  
   
“Oh, good choice.” Holster nodded. He gave the stuffed green bear, which was holding the lollipop bouquet in two velvet paws, an approving squeeze.  
   
His mother had had to fly back to Georgia for work, but Bitty was pretty sure that Ransom and Holster were being even more solicitous than even she would have been. They took his arm, his bag, his flowers, helped him across the floor and into the elevator.  
   
“Boys,” Bitty said irritably, when Ransom pointed at a wheelchair. “That’s ridiculous. I can walk just fine.”  
   
Ransom gestured wordlessly at the bandages still on Bitty’s legs. He was wearing shorts so they were very noticeable.  
   
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Bitty huffed, sitting in the chair. He crossed his arms. “They’re _burns_ , not breaks. Honestly.”  
   
By the time they had made it out of the labyrinth that was the hospital though, Bitty was secretly relieved that he hadn’t had to walk. It was Friday, nearly a full week since his consciousness had disappeared into the Conduit, and Bitty still felt oddly unmoored, like he was going to flop over as soon as he underwent the briefest of exertions, or maybe just float off into space instead.  
   
The drive from the hospital back to Samwell was almost an hour with traffic. Holster kept the music on a low murmur, and without meaning to, Bitty dozed on and off in the backseat, surrounded by his bouquets, and all the other little gifts his various well-wishers had sent up. These included but were not limited to: a selection of thrift shop rabbit figurines from Shitty and Lardo, and two giant bars of Belgian baking chocolate from an anonymous donor.  
   
Bitty had been anticipating a drive straight to his dormitory, where he could begin the arduous process of catching up on all of his pre-finals assignments. So, it was with surprise that he noticed that they had instead driven him around to the back of the Haus.  
   
“Guys?” he said, when Ransom tugged open the back door. “What’re we stopping here for?”  
   
Ransom grinned at him. “It’s lunchtime,” he said. “You didn’t want to have to go all the way over to the dining halls, did you?”  
   
“Come on.” Holster had hopped out of the driver’s seat. He leaned against the side of the car, adjusting his sunglasses. “We can order pizza or something.”  
   
“Uh.” Bitty thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. Sure.”  
   
Pizza did sound infinitely more appetizing than whatever was being served at the dining halls. Bitty accepted Ransom’s help out of the back of the van, careful not to squash his flowers.  
   
Bitty fully expected to open the door to a mostly empty Haus, perhaps even one returned to its previous state of nebulously smelling like stale beer, hot sauce, and old socks. As far as he knew, Jack and Shitty at least, definitely had a Friday afternoon class together. So when the door was tugged open and he was greeted with the scent of fresh pizza, cake, and a chorus of yells instead, he found himself incredibly taken aback.  
   
"Welcome back, Bitty!"  
   
"Good to have you alive, you little fucker!"  
   
"Glad you're okay!"  
   
Bewildered, Bitty turned to Ransom, who had reached out to steady him. "What—what's going on?"  
   
Random grinned at him. "We said pizza, bro."   
   
"We did say," Holster intoned behind them.  
   
Humiliatingly, Bitty's eyes burned. "You—guys!" He was smiling though. "You didn't have to do this!"  
   
"Come on, Bits," Shitty said, coming forward to grab at Bitty's arm in order to propel him into a chair. The hard wood of it had been thoughtfully lined with someone’s pillow. "You think we'd skip a chance to party? No way, man."  
   
"Oh, well..."  
   
"No booze for you though." Ransom had been surreptitiously paging through Bitty's discharge instructions. It was possible that Bitty should have been disconcerted by this, but he figured that Ransom was probably the only guy on the team who could possibly be trusted to make use of the information.  
   
Bitty shook his head. "I can't believe you guys did this." He covered his face with his hands, peeking out the gaps between his fingers. His voice was soft as he added, "Thanks."  
   
Shitty clapped him on the shoulder. "Thank _you_ , good sir, for not dying." He raised his voice. "Let's get this party started! Who has the fucking beer?"  
   
They fed him pizza and some chocolate cake. The cake was store bought, but the white-trim box it sat in had the name of one of the swankier bakeries in town penned carefully across the top, so clearly an effort had been made. There were even little chocolate candies all around the edges. Bitty's appetite had not entirely returned to normal, so he had only one slice of each, leaving part of his portion unfinished, but he felt satisfied nonetheless.   
   
Jack did notice though. He came up to Bitty and pointed at his plate.  
   
"Aren't you going to finish that?" There was an oddly teasing tone to his voice. Bitty lifted his chin.  
   
"Saving it for later," he said haughtily.  
   
The corners of Jack's eyes crinkled, and he let out a small laugh. "Whatever you say, Bittle."  
   
Bitty returned his face to its normal expression. He asked, curious, "Don't you have class today, Jack?"  
   
Jack merely shrugged, but Shitty, who seemed to cultivate the ability to eavesdrop on all conversations simultaneously, draped himself over Jack's seat. He ruffled Jack's hair.  
   
"Yeah, but since Zimmer-captain fucking organized this shindig, we told him he couldn't skip."  
   
Jack glared at Shitty, swatting his hand away. "Shits," he complained.  
   
"What? It's a good party. Take pride in your work, my brother."  
   
Jack sighed, stealing a glance over at Bitty. For his part, Bitty's mouth was at least only slightly open.  
   
"Did you really organize all this?"  
   
The tips of Jack's eats turned even pinker. "Lardo helped, too."  
   
"And Shitty," Shitty jumped in. "Shitty also helped. Shitty went and picked up the pizzas and cake."  
   
Bitty let out a snort. "Thanks, Shitty," he said warmly.   
   
Shitty tipped an imaginary hat to him.  
   
The party wound down after about only an hour, and Bitty wound down with it. Though some of the team remained, sipping beers on the porch, partitioning out the remaining bits of cake, Bitty found himself yawning more often then not. He had gotten used to taking afternoon naps, it would seem.  
   
Jack, who had spent the majority of the time hovering near him, if not exactly next to him, caught on immediately.   
   
"Do you want me to take you back to your dorm?"  
   
"Oh," said Bitty, caught off guard. He had been craning his neck to see if he could spot Ransom or Holster. They were both giants in a house of giants. By all rights it shouldn’t have been that difficult, but they appeared to have vanished. "I mean, my stuff's still all in Holster's car."  
   
Jack settled next to him. He was sipping a glass of water, and he'd only had one small piece of cake. Bitty felt an odd thrill that when _he_ made cake, Jack always had at least two pieces.  
   
I am such a good baker, Bitty thought to himself, with an uncharacteristic twitch of pride.  
   
"No, I had them take your things to your room so they'd be there when you wanted to go." Jack played with the rim of his glass. "So—do you? I mean." He shrugged. "Want to go?"   
   
"Oh. Um…”  
   
"I can give you a ride."  
   
Bitty frowned. "Really, you don't have to."  
   
"Bittle," Jack said, exasperated. "Just let me give you a ride, eh? None of us want you passing out on the quad."  
   
"Oh." Bitty flushed. "Well, if you put it like that..."  
   
Jack gave an abrupt nod and scraped his keys off the table. "Ready?"  
   
“Wait, right now?”  
   
Jack favored him with an incredibly unimpressed look. “You look like you’re about to fall asleep.”  
   
“I am not!” Bitty said, completely ruining his protest with a yawn.   
   
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Ready?”  
   
Bitty slumped. "Yeah, okay."   
   
The ride over to the dorms was short and quiet. Jack drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and Bitty leaned the side of his head against the window. He wondered if he should say something to Jack. Another 'thank you' didn't quite feel like it would cover it, but then again, there didn't seem to be anything better.   
   
Jack was equally insistent on helping Bitty up the flights of stairs, and then making sure he was absolutely comfortable on his tiny twin bed.   
   
"Jack," Bitty said, threads of exasperation creeping into his voice. "Thank you, really. But I'm fine here. I swear."  
   
"If you need something," Jack started, still lingering in Bitty's doorway. If Bitty had been forced to put a word to it, he would’ve said that Jack was nervous, but that was patently absurd.  
   
He tried for a reassuring smile anyway. "I can call you." Bitty patted the side of his bed, where his cell phone lay nestled among the covers, right next to half-hidden Señor Bun.   
   
Jack let out a breath. "If you're sure."  
   
"I'm sure." Bitty nodded. "Thanks, Jack."  
   
Jack lifted his hand for a last little wave, and then shut the door softly behind him.  
   
Alone now, Bitty snuggled into the covers. He was full and out of the hospital, he was not dead or comatose, there had been a surprise party in his honor...what more could a boy want?  
   
His eyes were already closing. With the last of his conscious thought he muttered, "Jack Zimmerman. Nursemaid." And let out a small giggle. Really. What were the odds?  
   
   
#  
   
   
The remainder of Bitty's convalescence was a good deal less pleasant than his homecoming. Near death experiences were no excuse for not finishing one's finals, after all, and Bitty had to double down to make sure he wasn't actually at risk for failing.  
   
While his professors, on the whole, didn't seem too thrilled with his excuses, some of his classmates at least, were a little easier to impress.  
   
"I can't believe you did that." A girl, who Bitty had accidentally made cautious, classmate-level friends with at the beginning of the semester, clucked over his bandages. She twirled one finger through her, ever present, blond pigtails. "But I don't get why there wasn't anyone there. Like, isn't that kind of a lawsuit waiting to happen?"  
   
Bitty, who had answered this particular question at least twice already, shrugged. "There would've been someone at a Dance tournament. But C-Formers aren't supposed to know how to get all the way into a Conduit. It takes lots of a certain kind of practice, you know?" He smiled. “Can you imagine a bunch of C-Formers sitting on the ground, trying to meditate through to a Conduit?”  
   
She didn’t laugh. "Still seems stupid to me. Not to have anyone."  
   
Bitty was gathering up his books now. "Guess it's probably hard to find someone, too," he allowed. "And expensive."  
   
Her mouth twisted. "All that training?"  
   
"Yeah."  
   
Jack hadn't needed all that training though, a small but insistent voice said in the back of his head. He'd just gone right over there and pulled Bitty out of the Conduit like it was nothing.  
   
Bitty ignored it.  
   
"Anyway." He slung his backpack over his shoulder. "I'm all right now, as you can see." He grinned, sweeping a hand down to indicate his mostly hale body.  
   
"Lucky," she said.  
   
Bitty nodded, the grin fading slightly. "Lucky," he echoed.  
   
And speak of the devil. Jack was waiting for him outside the lecture hall. He stood leaning against the wall, bag resting at his feet, sheaf of papers in his hand. Bitty slowed when he saw him.  
   
"Hey, Jack," he said. "What's up?"  
   
Jack glanced up. “Oh. Bittle,” he said, like he hadn’t been lurking outside the door for the express purpose of meeting him. “Done?”  
   
“Done,” Bitty confirmed. They fell into step together. “You know,” Bitty said, as they opened the door to the outside, breathing in the spring pollen and the sounds of chickadees, “you don’t have to keep walking me around. I’ve been doing okay.”  
   
Jack said, “I was going to go get some coffee at Annie’s. Want to come?”  
   
Bitty pondered that for a moment. Technically, he’d been planning to go take a nap, before beginning an anxiety-fueled study session for his sociology final next week. On the other hand…  
   
“Yeah, okay,” Bitty said. “I’m always down for Annie’s.” The straps on his backpack were digging into a sore spot on his shoulder, but he waited to adjust them until Jack had blinked at him, the edges of his mouth twitching up, and then had swung back to face forward again. Only when Jack wasn’t looking did Bitty give the straps a quick tug.  
   
Jack still kept darting glances at him though. Bitty wanted to tell him to knock it off, but he managed to hold his tongue. Bitty had scared them all to death. Jack was entitled to be a bit worried.  
   
He held back a sigh.  
   
Like it always was near the end of the semester, Annie’s was packed full of frantically procrastinating students. Jack was big enough that he should’ve had little trouble parting the crowds, but his born and bred politeness made it difficult, so instead it was Bitty, whose politeness had a bit more of an aggressive edge to it, who claimed them a table.  
   
“Finals all done?”  
   
“Not on your life.” Bitty snorted. “Still have two papers and a test.” He toyed with the sugar packets. “I still don’t get why we get two weeks for spring finals, but we only got one for winter.”  
   
“Seniors only get one.”  
   
“You’re not a senior.”  
   
Jack smirked at him. “So you’re saying you don’t need the extra time?”  
   
Bitty gave him the eye. “Smug is not a good look on you.”  
   
That time, Jack grinned outright.  
   
Jack ordered his plain black coffee, and Bitty went for something with a bit more flavor. Jack also bought a croissant, but he slid it over to Bitty as soon as it had been acquired, so Bitty, sensing an opportunity, immediately attacked it with some raspberry jam.  
   
“Do you ever make jam?”  
   
Bitty’s eyes lit up, but it took a moment for him to finish chewing and swallowing. “Of course! It’s family tradition. Why?”  
   
“Just wondering.” Jack shrugged. “You make all that other stuff.”  
   
“Other stuff,” Bitty repeated. He shook his head. “I don’t know how y’all even lived before I got here. Honestly.”  
   
“Hot pockets,” said Jack, “don’t even need to be microwaved, really. Just grab and go.” He sipped his coffee, face pleasantly blank, but Bitty caught the glint in his eye. He made sure to shudder extra-theatrically.  
   
“I’m ordering an extra serving of pie for you tonight, Mr. Zimmermann.” He pointed a piece of croissant at him. “Just for saying that.” He made a face. “Ugh, _cold_ hot pockets? What planet are you even from?”  
   
“They have some good protein.” Jack did not look displeased at being told he was required to eat extra pie. “Very convenient.”  
   
“Sometimes I hate you,” Bitty told him, and finished off the rest of the croissant in revenge.  
   
   
#  
   
   
Bitty might’ve missed C-Form, but he was also grateful for the extra time. No way would he have been able to finish his back pile of work while also going to practices. As it was, he’d barely made his deadline for his final history paper, the only saving grace being Jack’s willingness to edit it for him.  
   
Bitty hadn’t even _asked_ that time, but Jack, peering over Bitty’s shoulder at his course textbooks in the library, had spotted the familiar syllabus.  
   
“Better get someone to edit that, Bittle,” he’d said. “She’s really tough on the finals.”  
   
“Ugh,” Bitty groaned. He laid his head down onto the open pages of his book. “You volunteering?”  
   
“Hmm.” Jack’s lips were pursed. Bitty turned his head to peer at him.  
   
“Is that a yes?”  
   
“…Fine.” Jack settled next to him. “Email it to me.”  
   
Bitty emailed in his final paper at 5:52 pm with a breath of relief and eight minutes to spare. As he snapped his laptop shut and made to stand however, he noticed Jack patting his pockets, then emptying his wallet, then making a face.  
   
“Lose something?”  
   
Jack squinted. “I think I left my student ID in my other pair of jeans.”  
   
Bitty couldn’t help it. He snickered. “You?” he said.  
   
Jack looked very disconcerted. “I think so,” he said. Then, grumbling, “I can’t believe this.”  
   
“It’s not a big deal.” Bitty got to his feet, swinging his backpack over his shoulder. “We’ll just have to go get it.”  
   
“But we were going to meet the team in the dining hall after this.”  
   
Rolling his eyes, Bitty took the opportunity to seize Jack’s elbow and urge him towards the door. “We can make a stop at the Haus, Jack. It’s fine. I’ll text them.”  
   
Jack let out a breath. “Okay.”  
   
Back at the Haus, while Bitty sent a series of text updates on his nearly dead phone, Jack pawed unsuccessfully through a pile of discarded laundry. Bitty was pretending not to watch, or notice that Jack totally owned a pair of boxers with little C-Form cleats plastered all over them, when Jack’s phone buzzed. With a sigh, Jack fished it out of his pocket and glanced at it.  
   
“Oh, hold on,” he said, expression clearing. “It’s my mom.”  
   
From his spot perched on Jack’s bed, Bitty gave him a lazy, wordless wave. He was feeling too satisfied with having actually gotten his final paper in on time, to worry about the continued delay regarding dinner. Jack put the phone to his ear.  
   
“ _Maman_?”  
   
Bitty startled a little bit. Jack’s accent was slight, and Bitty had honestly forgotten that Jack’s first language wasn’t even English. It made his voice sound different somehow. More fluid. Gentler.  
   
Or maybe that was just because he was talking to his mother.  
   
As Jack spoke, he finished rooting through his laundry. Still empty-handed, he bit his lip in thought, glancing around the room, as if the missing student ID would somehow make itself known if he just scowled hard enough.  
   
Bitty tilted his head. “Laundry room?” he suggested.  
   
Jack blinked at him, forehead wrinkling further, and then nodded slowly. Shifting the phone to his other ear and still talking, he made his way out the door and down the hallway.  
   
Bitty pulled out his own phone again. Pointedly ignoring the red battery sign in the upper right corner, he had begun to pull up Pinterest, when the entire screen abruptly went black on him.  
   
“Damn it,” he muttered. He slid off the bed, glancing about in vain for a spare charger or cord that maybe Jack had left lying around. After some fruitless poking in and around the desk however, Bitty was forced to come to the conclusion that if there was a charger, it was clearly keeping company with Jack’s missing ID.  
   
With a sigh, Bitty searched instead for something else to occupy his attention.  
   
He picked up the first thing that looked even remotely interesting. On closer inspection, it was one of Jack’s C-Form books. Probably something he was going to be using for his thesis, if the numerous multi-colored sticky notes jammed at perfectly perpendicular angles to the text, were any indication.  
   
Well, Jack was always haranguing them about the origins of C-Form, and how they should all be educating themselves about it. Here, Bitty supposed, was his chance. He resettled himself on the bed and opened the book to a section at random.  
   
_“The question of whether or not the use of extra pipes at the base construction of C-Form rinks has any discernable effect on the quality of—”_  
   
Bitty flipped to a different section, and found a page smothered in pink and green notes. He read:  
   
_“…Over the utilization of‘ anchor-pair links, built up through means unspecified in earlier literature, but which more recent studies have shown necessitated repetitive energy exchange under stress…”_  
   
Bitty blinked.  
   
_“…Coupled with a deep emotional connection.”_  
   
Wait, what?  
   
Frowning, Bitty stopped. He searched for the beginning of the passage, finding it marked on the previous page with a yellow sticky note.  
   
_Conduit Breakthrough and Traditional Pair-Anchoring Technique_  
   
“What the hell?” he muttered. He was half-tempted to flip to an entirely new section, but the sheer mass of sticky notes seemed to say that there must be something of interest in this chapter. Or, if nothing else, maybe Jack was focusing the subject of his thesis on it.  
   
With a shrug, Bitty began to read again. He read more slowly this time.  
   
_“The immediate advantage of an anchor-pair link is apparent when one considers the inherent danger involved in advanced Conduit usage. In wartime, platoons containing Conduit-trained soldiers typically involved three individuals: one for direct combat, one for energy refuel, and a third to prevent either of the other two from overreaching into the Conduit and thus becoming incapacitated.”_  
   
Bitty pressed his lips together. He wasn’t sure if he really wanted to be reading about Conduit incapacitation just now.  
   
_“Combat circumstances were such that it was not unusual for a platoon’s Conduit triad to be reduced to a pair or even a single user. Consequently, the incidence of Conduit-trained soldiers overreaching into the Conduit, was quite high. It is probable that these particularly high-stress circumstances are what lead to the formation of the original anchor-pair links. While semi-permanent energy meshing between individuals was certainly not unheard of at the time, typically for ceremonial purposes, the spontaneity of the wartime anchor-pair link is what earned it its notoriety. The benefits however, seemed to far outweigh the risks of energy-bleed or link paralysis. With a successful anchor-pair link, one member of the pair could afford to go deeply into a Conduit without fear, so long as their linked partner remained shallow. In case of emergency, the anchor-pair link would allow for the individual on the other side of it to hoist their partner safely back to the surface of the Conduit, if such intervention were required.”_  
   
The wrinkle between Bitty’s eyebrows deepened. He bit his lip.  
   
Why did Jack have this marked again?  
   
_“However, just because a platoon contained only two Conduit users instead of three, does not appear to correlate directly with whether or not an anchor-pair link would form between the individuals in question. Rather, it seems as though a particular set of circumstances was required in order for formation to take place: frequent and repetitive mid to deep-level energy transmission, a high stress environment and, perhaps most importantly, emotional attachment._  
   
There was an odd flutter in his stomach. Bitty told himself firmly that he was being absurd.  
   
_“Though Conduit historians have debated at length 1,2 regarding what, exactly, constitutes an ‘emotional attachment’, as well as the inevitable chicken vs. egg follow-up of which came first—attachment or Conduit—it is worth noting that of the anchor-pairs interviewed regarding the subject, sixty-three percent had, by that point, commenced a relationship of a sexual nature with their fellow anchor-pair. Given society’s views regarding same-sex relations during the time period, it is incredibly likely that the number was actually higher than the sixty-three percent who admitted to it.”_  
   
Bitty slammed the book shut. He lifted his hand to his cheeks and was unsurprised to find them hot. He swallowed.  
   
_High Stress. Emotional attachment. Sixty-three percent._  
   
No, he was reading too much into this.  
   
Why did Jack even have this book?  
   
_Emotional attachment._  
   
Heart pounding, Bitty opened the book again, scanning down to the final paragraph.  
   
_“For the reasons stated in the above, the development of anchor-pair links was considerably more common under the strenuous conditions of war. This was due, again, to the obvious advantage of the ability to deeply enter an element without fear of being disconnected from the outside world. Naturally, as conflict declined, the incidence of anchor-pair links did as well. This should not be taken to mean, however, that they are completely unheard of today; indeed, in the more artistic expression of elemental melding, i.e. Conduit Dance Magic, pair dancers frequently utilize similar such links, though they are less spontaneous and more deliberate than the originals. On the other hand, in C-Form, even if present, anchor-pair links are seldom diagnosed, due to the surficial nature of the game.”_  
   
Bitty exhaled.  
   
_“However, the high-stress environment and close friendships formed between members of C-Form teams, does provide a uniquely similar set of circumstances to those experienced by the original anchor-link pairs. As such, C-Formers should not be precluded from the possibility of also having formed anchor-pair links, though the links may never be recognized, or used to their full potential.”_  
   
Very deliberately, Bitty closed the book and set it back down on Jack’s desk. He sat still for a moment, staring blankly at the wall, heart still thumping, trying to ignore the faint sounds of Jack’s voice coming from the hallway.  
   
He tried taking a few deep breaths, but they did nothing except make him feel like he was about to hyperventilate. After a few more failed attempts, he laid on his back, then flipped over and stretched out on his stomach on Jack’s bed, inhaling the scent of him left on the covers.  
   
It probably shouldn’t have, but it did something at least to calm the heat in him. It was one part fury, one part thrill, and a third part—well. Something else entirely.  
   
Bitty tried to take more breaths.  
   
By the time Jack stepped back into the room, phone shoved in his pocket and student ID (only slightly discolored from the wash) clutched triumphantly in his right hand, Bitty’s heart rate had mostly returned to normal. He was lying sideways on Jack’s bed, back to the wall, to all observers still playing with his phone, never mind that he was actually only staring at a blank screen.  
   
If Bitty hadn’t been looking for it, he would’ve missed the sudden and uneasy expression that flitted across Jack’s face as he spotted first Bitty’s new position, and then the book on his desk.  
   
But then, evidently deciding that just because he’d left the book out didn’t necessarily mean that Bitty would’ve had any reason to read it, the tension at the corners of his eyes relaxed. He crossed the threshold. “Sorry,” he said. “My mom.”  
   
“That’s okay.” Bitty struggled upright. He stuck his dead phone into his pocket. “Find it?”  
   
In response, Jack held up his ID, the cant of his shoulders sheepish.  
   
Bitty tried to smile at it, tried not to think about what he had read in that book, sitting so innocently on the desk, all of its sticky notes so neatly lined up. It was harder that he would’ve thought. Still, he persisted.  
   
“At least we know you do your laundry.” The joke felt a little flat, but Bitty didn't think Jack noticed. He was too busy looking distastefully at the ID.  
   
“Maybe I should get a new one.”  
   
At that, Bitty rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Goodness, Jack,” he said. “It’s fine. Look, I can even read your name from here. You should see the state of _mine_ , and I’ve had it less than a year. I think I’ve washed it at least six times.”  
   
“If you say so,” Jack said, making a grimace that was just south of a literal pout.  
   
Bitty huffed out a laugh. “Come on,” he said. “Or the rest of the team’ll be done eating before we even get there.”  
   
At the dining hall, they caught Shitty just as he had been about to leave. Once he saw them however, he was more than willing to prolong his evening with an extra cup of coffee, and had soon drawn Jack into a debate about something concerning tournament referees and children’s sports.  
   
For his part, Bitty tuned out the conversation. He focused first on his spaghetti, and when that turned out to be less than stimulating, switched his attention to considering Jack’s cheekbones, tracing his eyes along the contours of Jack’s face, the silhouette of his nose.  
   
Bitty stabbed at a green bean. Had Jack _known?_ Or had it just been something that had happened in the moment, and he’d only thought to research it later, when all hadn’t seemed quite—quite right?  
   
Jesus, did anyone _else_ know? Bitty immediately flushed. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. There had been a lot of people at the tournament. They’d all seen what had happened.  
   
What about the rest of the team? The doctors? The coaches?  
   
Oh lord, his _mother_?  
   
He cast another quick glance at Jack, now gesticulating wildly with his hands at Shitty, whose only response seemed to be to stroke his mustache.  
   
Had he meant to tell Bitty?  
   
Well, it didn’t exactly matter, Bitty thought, making a vicious spearing motion straight into his potatoes. The cat was out of the bag now. But should he tell _Jack_?  
   
“Bitty?” Shitty was looking at him funny. Bitty tried to stop scowling.  
   
“Hmm?”  
   
“You okay?”  
   
Jack was looking at him too.  
   
“Yeah,” he said. He tried on a smile, but it didn’t exactly fit so he let it go, shrugging his left shoulder. “Just kind of tired, I guess.”  
   
_Tired_ was the magical word these days, Bitty thought. They didn’t even look suspicious.  
   
“You should get some rest after this,” Jack told him, with all the expertise of a high-ranking collegiate athlete with zero medical degrees and a lot of conviction.  
   
He pushed his plate away. “Yeah, I will.”  
   
But what he really needed, Bitty decided, examining a now turned-away again Jack through eyes narrowed to slits, was a plan.  
   
   
#  
   
   
It was so close to the end of the semester that Bitty halfway feared that he would be home to Georgia before he had a chance to confront Jack about what he’d read. As it turned out however, all he needed was an empty kitchen, an empty Haus, and an empty evening stretching out in front of him.  
   
Bitty didn’t need to track down Jack. He just needed a place and a time and a moment.  
   
Jack would come to him.  
   
Bitty settled on making a pie. Cake might’ve been more celebratory for the end of the semester, and the team as a whole had plenty to celebrate, but that wasn’t the mood he was after tonight.  
   
Pie was home. Pie was warm, and buttery, and too-full evenings with family and friends, and familiarity wrapped all around.  
   
Tonight, he wanted comfort.  
   
Bitty was able to admit to himself that he wasn’t exactly sure whose comfort he was trying for: his own, or Jack’s. But either way, he figured there wasn’t any harm in it. Besides, the pie would get eaten regardless, so at least someone would be happy.  
   
He was laying out the lattice, careful to pinch the edges and layer it on top of the thinly sliced apples just so, when Jack made his presence known.  
   
“You ever consider kitchen witchery as a career?”  
   
Bitty whirled around to point the nearest implement—which turned out to be a fork—at him. “You watch your mouth, Jack Zimmermann,” he said.  
   
Jack just looked amused. He scrubbed his hands through his wet hair. He must have been showering. “Is that a no?”  
   
“I,” Bitty said, “do not need _magic_ to make my pies taste good.”  
   
“It’s a complement,” Jack insisted. On his route to the table, he stole a piece of apple off the counter.  
   
“It’s insulting is what it is.” Bitty rotated the first pie, making sure all was well, then slid it over and grabbed the second. “Magic is for the ice. _Talent_ is for the kitchen.”  
   
“I’m going to tell all the Gender and Incantations majors that you said that.”  
   
“Go ahead,” Bitty said boldly. “I’d like to see even one of them try to make a potion that holds a candlestick to my mama’s jams.”  
   
“Oh. Is _she_ into kitchen witchery?” Jack said innocently.  
   
Bitty threw a potholder at him. Settled in at the table and poking at spare scraps of dough for the crust, Jack clearly hadn’t been expecting it, so the potholder hit him square in the face. Bitty felt one hundred percent vindicated by this.  
   
“Kitchen witchery,” he muttered, shoving both pies into the oven, one after another. “I ought to ban you.”  
   
“I live here.” Jack was picking at the splinters on the table itself now. Bitty’s lip curled.  
   
“I’m going to look up a workaround in the bylaws.”  
   
“Shitty won’t help you.”  
   
“He will if he ever wants to eat my pie again.”  
   
A pause. “Shitty might help you,” Jack conceded.  
   
Bitty allowed himself a small smirk. As he turned to gather the rolling pin and cutting boards, a comfortable silence descended. The Haus was otherwise empty. The kitchen smelled like good, warm food. Jack was at the table.  
   
_I could ask him now_ , Bitty thought.  
   
Instead, he washed the rolling pin. He leaned it to dry against the windowsill.  
   
_Now_.  
   
He ran water over the cutting board, rinsing off apple juice and scraps of the skins.  
   
_Now_.  
   
He pulled out a hand towel.  
   
_Now_.  
   
He set the hand towel down again.  
   
_Now._  
   
He inhaled.  
   
“Jack?”  
   
“Hmm?”  
   
“Were you ever going to tell me?”  
   
“Huh?”  
   
“C-Form,” Bitty said. And then, “The anchor-pair link.”  
   
Over at the table, Jack froze. His gaze darted towards Bitty, then away. His shoulders went rigid.  
   
Something in Bitty’s chest heated. “You weren’t,” he said. It was biting. “You _weren’t_. You told me all that other stuff, but you weren’t going to tell me this.”  
   
Slowly, Jack shook his head.  
   
The feeling in his chest grew. It pinched now. It _hurt_. All of a sudden, Bitty knew, just as sure as he’d known anything, that he was less than a shove away from crying. He bit his lip. “Jack…” he trailed off. “Why?”  
   
Jack’s voice was tight. His whole body was tight. He seemed smaller somehow, hunched down in the chair, like it would protect him. “I didn’t want you to feel obligated,” he said, miserable as anything.  
   
“Obligated!” Bitty exclaimed. “Obligated?”  
   
Jack raised his head. “It’s a potential, not a promise.”  
   
“Not a promise?” The hurt made Bitty’s words extra sharp.  
   
Jack darted a glance towards the kitchen door, like someone in the empty Haus might be listening in. He pressed his lips together, looking like he might want to add something, but was sure quite how to phrase it. “Not a promise,” he repeated.  
   
Bitty slammed his hand down on the counter. “I don’t know, Jack,” he said, scathing, “but my energy and your energy being permanently latched together enough for you to just pull me right out of a Conduit easy as anything sounds _pretty damn promising_!”  
   
“No, Bittle,” Jack said. “You’re getting this wrong. That’s not what I meant—”  
   
“Then tell me what you meant!” Bitty snapped. He drew himself up. “Is it because I’m a boy?”  
   
“What? _No_!” Jack’s eyes widened.  
   
“Then do you just not like me, Jack? Is that it?” Bitty’s nostrils flared. “You could’ve told me that, too. I could’ve taken it.”  
   
“That’s not—I like you _fine_ , Bittle, I really—” there was a flush to Jack’s pale cheeks now. “I just—”  
   
“Oh, _fine_. You like me ‘ _fine’_. Well then, Mr. Zimmermann, way to make a boy feel special—”  
   
“I like you more than fine!” Jack shouted, standing, and it was so sudden and unexpected that Bitty’s mouth clicked shut. Jack’s breath hitched. He closed his eyes, breathed, then opened them. He looked right at Bitty. “I like you more than fine,” he said again, hoarsely. “I really, really, like you more than fine.” He dropped his gaze, murmuring, “The link wouldn’t have taken, otherwise.”  
   
Bitty stared at him. “Then,” he said, and the anger was gone but the rest remained, a confusing maelstrom of hurt and hope and heat. “Why?”  
   
Jack wet his lips. “I told you,” he said, and his words were barely there, a rumble in his chest, not meant to penetrate beyond the space between them. “I didn’t want you to feel obligated. I didn’t want you to feel…” he searched for the word. “Trapped,” he finished. He swallowed. “With me.” He flinched as he said it. Something in Bitty flinched too, as if on reflex.  
   
“Jack,” Bitty whispered.  
   
Jack’s jaw tightened. “You could have anyone, Bittle,” he said. “I know I have…I’m not…” he sighed. “I didn’t want you obligated. Just because the, the C-Form and the—okay, I didn't _know_ about the link at the time, okay? But that just makes it even worse, anyway. It’s not—it wouldn’t be fair.”  
   
“To who?”  
   
“To you.”  
   
Bitty huffed. “I think you mean _us_. Was I even supposed to get a say in this?”  
   
Jack’s eyes darted away. For Bitty, that was answer enough. He made an irritated noise in the back of his throat. “You are the most frustrating human being I’ve ever met. I can’t _believe_ you were planning to—what, let me live my life without knowing about…” words failed him. He waved his hands around, “ _Anything?”_  
   
Jack’s face fell even further. He looked like a kicked puppy.  
   
For some reason, that just made Bitty want to rage even more. He stalked toward Jack, cornering him next to the refrigerator.  
   
“Jack Zimmermann,” he said, grabbing a fistful of Jack’s shirt. “I’m only going to say this once so let me make this abundantly clear.” He yanked Jack down to eyelevel and said, very firmly, “You don’t get to tell me what I want, you absolute jerk.” And then he pulled Jack in and kissed him full on the mouth.  
   
Jack gasped into the kiss. Bitty hadn’t kissed too many people, but by god if he couldn’t _talk_ Jack into submission, then this seemed like the next best option. He let go of Jack’s shirt to clamp his hand around the back of Jack’s neck. Somehow, Jack’s hands had found his waist. His fingers dug into Bitty’s sides and Bitty’s heart pounded and they kissed and kissed and kissed.  
   
They fell back from one another. Jack’s expression was shell-shocked, his hair wild, high color in his cheeks. He looked at Bitty like he’d never seen anything quite like him before.  
   
Meanwhile, Bitty looked at Jack like he was wondering just how long was socially acceptable to wait between kissing someone within an inch of their life, and then lunging back to do it again.  
   
He decided to wait. Jack still hadn’t said anything.  
   
Finally Bitty said, “So there, Mr. Zimmermann. It’s my decision. You don’t get to tell me what to do.” He folded his arms, belligerent to the soles of his feet.  
   
Jack gaped at him.  
   
Bitty glared back.  
   
The timer on the oven beeped.  
   
“Shut up,” Bitty told it, not taking his eyes off Jack. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”  
   
Jack let out an odd choking noise. And then his shoulders began to shake. And then he was chuckling. And then it was a full-on deep body laugh. It shook him from his head to his toes, made lines appear at the corners of his eyes, his teeth flashed and one little dimple peeked out.  
   
Bitty felt, possibly, like he might have died.  
   
After what seemed like considerable effort, Jack brought himself back under control. “You’re sure?” he said. His voice was soft but it still cracked. “It’s a lot.”  
   
Bitty gave him a very unimpressed look. “I don’t think I believe that you’re an A student any more,” he muttered, rubbing his temples. “Yes, Jack. I’m _sure_. Good lord, what does a boy have to do to convince you?”  
   
Jack let out another breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Okay, Bittle,” he said. He placed a hand on Bitty’s shoulder, then seemed to reconsider and slid it down Bitty’s arm to clasp his hand instead. He didn’t squeeze, just held it, gentle like holding an egg or a flower or anything else small, but brimming with potential. “If you’re sure. Your decision.”  
   
“My decision,” Bitty repeated. He nodded firmly. With his free hand, he touched Jack’s cheek. “That’s you, Jack,” he said. “You’re my decision.”  
   
That time, Jack was the one who kissed him.

 


	7. Epilogue

**Epilogue**  
   
   
Intellectually, Bitty knew that Georgia was much hotter than Massachusetts. Logically therefore, he had definitely experienced worse temperatures than this. Recently, even. However, at least his parents’ house had central air. The Haus barely had window units. He could _feel_ the sweat trickling down his back.  
   
Bitty made a noise of extreme discontent.  
   
“Jack, honey?”  
   
“Yeah?” Jack poked his head into the kitchen. He was wearing basketball shorts and his feet were bare, but he still hadn’t stripped off his shirt, unlike the majority of the team, in deference to the heat. Bitty didn’t know if he ought to be grateful or sad about this.  
   
He turned away from the stove. “Do you think you could bring me something from the cooler out back?” He eyed the pan. It was going to be a lemon curd, and eventually worth it, but right now he wished he’d just stuck with icebox pies.  
   
“Yeah, no problem.” Jack didn’t leave the kitchen though. Instead, he stepped over to Bitty, slinging his arms around his waist.  
   
“It’s kind of hot for this,” Bitty pointed out, leaning back into him anyway. “Oh, watch it. That burner’s on.”  
   
Jack drew away. “Coke okay?”  
   
Not really paying attention, Bitty said, “What kind?”  
   
He could feel the eye roll. “Coke, coke. That doesn’t even make sense, Bittle.”  
   
“Don’t sass me, Mr. Zimmermann.” But Bitty felt his lips curve upward anyway. He spotted something out the window. “Better remind the frogs not to drink on the front lawn before dark,” he added. “Shitty said the police have been around.”  
   
“Yeah, gentlemen, they are downright lurking. Bunch of motherfuckers.” Shitty stomped in to drop a massive pile of pizza boxes on the front table. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come get this fucking pizza!” he hollered. He tilted his head, frowning. “What the hell are you making, Bits? Smells sweet.”  
   
“Lemon curd,” Bitty said, as a trio of frogs tumbled into the kitchen. Two of them—Dex, Bitty reminded himself, and Nursey—were bickering. The third, Chowder, had taken advantage of their distraction to snag first dibs on the pepperoni.  
   
“A strategist,” Jack murmured in his ear, hot breath tickling the edge of Bitty’s neck. “Good trait in a goalie.”  
   
Bitty snorted. He did watch Chowder more carefully though. Their new goalie was just about the polar opposite of what Johnson had been. He wondered how Chowder managed to focus long enough to hold a Conduit-web together.  
   
“Bitty!” came an enraged shout from the basement. “Where the fuck did you put all the beer?”  
   
Bitty and Jack exchanged an exasperated look.  
   
“I’ll go tell him,” Jack said. He kissed the top of Bitty’s head, before releasing him and wandering over to the basement door. The sounds of, “We put it all in the cooler, Holster, Christ,” followed him down the steps.  
   
Bitty shook his head. He returned his attention to the saucepan.  
   
“Hey, Bitty?” Chowder asked suddenly. He spoke around a mouthful of pizza.  
   
“Hmmm?”  
   
“What’s it like doing C-Form with an anchor-pair link?”  
   
“Oh, uh.” Bitty rubbed the back of his neck, the tips of his ears warming. He hadn’t been expecting that question. “I guess…why do you want to know?”  
   
“I dunno. I just heard about it, and they—Shitty, I mean. I think it was Shitty?”  
   
“It wasn’t me, bro.”  
   
“Yeah, okay. But someone said you had one? So I was just wondering. It just sounds _super cool_ , you know?”  
   
“Are you sure it’s not against the rules?” That was Dex. He’d stopped snipping at Nursey long enough to grab his own slice, and now stood sort of in the middle of the kitchen, just to the other side of the sink.  
   
“It’s not,” Bitty said. “Jack looked it up.” He stirred the lemon curd, then glanced up at the ceiling. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”  
   
“Oh, then that’s okay,” Chowder reassured him. “We just thought it sounded, like, ‘swasome, you know? Like, just wondering. What if I got one, but I didn’t know what it felt like so I didn’t even know I had one?”  
   
Bitty leaned back against the counter. “Well, I don’t think you’d have to worry about that,” he said. “It’s hard to explain but…” he smiled, small and secret. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt.”  
   
There was a long and contemplative silence, wherein all of the individuals assembled considered the implications of that.  
   
And then Shitty pushed up his sunglasses.  
   
“Brah, I think that’s a fine.”  
   
Lardo poked her head in around the doorframe. “I only heard the second half of it and just that part was a fine.”  
   
“Double fine.”  
   
“Triple fine.”  
   
“How do you figure?” Bitty demanded.  
   
“Can’t argue with a fine. Quadruple fine.”  
   
“Vultures,” Bitty huffed. He reached into his pocket and found two quarters. “You’ll take these and that’s all I have.”  
   
“I’m going to charge you interest, good sir,” Shitty said, tilting the chair on its back legs into his previous relaxed pose.  
   
“Shitty!”  
   
By the time Jack emerged from the basement and back into the kitchen, Holster in tow, a red-faced Bitty was furiously stirring the smoking lemon curd, two of the frogs were arguing about the ecological benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle, and Shitty held sway over a court made up of the remaining frog, drawing out some long winded-story, with Lardo leaning in to make the occasional interjection.  
   
Jack moved to stand close to Bitty. He handed him a coke. “What’s going on?”  
   
Bitty accepted the drink, lifting the can to his warm forehead. “Shitty is a menace,” he said. Then, “Thanks.”  
   
“No problem.”  
   
Bitty hummed in response. The lemon curd was starting to look thick enough now, he ought to be able to leave it alone. On the other hand, he thought that if he were to abandon it now, some of it might be swiped.  
   
“Jack,” he murmured, “what do you think are the chances of someone stealing this?”  
   
Jack gave the pan, and then the rest of the room, a measuring glance. All of sudden, he leaned down to give Bitty a none too gentle kiss, backing him up against the counter in the process, and then just as suddenly, releasing him.  
   
If it hadn’t been for the countertop at his back, Bitty was sure his knees would’ve buckled. “Jack!” he said, but his eyes sparkled. “What on earth was that for?”  
   
Jack shrugged. “Just felt like it.” He grabbed the remaining pizza boxes. “It’s too hot in here,” he told the rest of them. “Let’s take these to the other room.” He began to lead the others out of the kitchen, sending a wink towards Bitty as they passed.  
   
Bitty touched his fingers to his lips. They still tingled.  
   
It was the best feeling in the world.

 

 

  
   
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's been reading and commenting and encouraging this whole way. You're all amazing!


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